Re: Are throwing default constructors bad style, and if so, why?

From:
David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:00:40 CST
Message-ID:
<8763nvgdbs.fsf@mcbain.luannocracy.com>
on Mon Oct 13 2008, JoshuaMaurice-AT-gmail.com wrote:

On Oct 12, 3:29 pm, David Abrahams <d...@boostpro.com> wrote:

on Sat Oct 04 2008, JoshuaMaurice-AT-gmail.com wrote:

And I really, really like exceptions and RAII. Damn. Disclaimer: This
doesn't kill all of RAII, but it kills some of it. It effectively
forces two phase construction for most classes if you want efficient
code on all platforms, and that makes me very sad.


And how, exactly, is two-phase construction going to save you cycles?


To have single phase construction, constructors must acquires
resources. Acquiring resources can fail. User's must be able to know
if acquiring a resource fails. The only way I know of doing this is
with exceptions or 'zombie' objects. Exceptions carry significant
overhead on some implementations, so we're left with zombie objects,
and a function to query if it's a zombie.

Resource r;
if (r.isZombie())
     return false;

Otherwise, we can do two phase construction, acquiring resources in
init(), and foregoing all exception use. It is very much like the
above approach; a zombie state is still required.

Resource r;
if (!r.init())
     return false;

The bad compilers which handle exceptions poorly can be configured to
introduce no exception overhead in these two examples as nothing here
throws, avoiding the significant penalty of exception overhead.


Maybe I'm missing something. If the user needs the ultimate effect of
single-phase construction, he has to invoke both the throwing and
nonthrowing phases in the 2-phase case. If both phases could be
accomplished without throwing, there'd obviously be no advantage to
2-phase construction. Otherwise, phase 2 can throw, and the compiler is
still going to have to handle the possibility of an exception from phase
2, isn't it?

--
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com

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