Re: Future of C++

From:
Eugene Gershnik <gershnik@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Thu, 7 Aug 2008 15:28:52 CST
Message-ID:
<ed1e52d8-18ae-415e-87e6-52a455b50126@b38g2000prf.googlegroups.com>
On Aug 7, 12:11 pm, Andre Kaufmann <akfmn...@t-online.de> wrote:

Eugene Gershnik wrote:

Nonsense. First of all there is nothing wrong with having a non-
virtual *protected* destructor in a base class. Second introducing


But what it's good for (not to make it virtual) - besides having perhaps
a smaller vtable ?


You might want to have an interface that is destroyed through some
means different from 'delete'. A classical example is intrusive
reference counting:

class Base
{
public:
     virtual void add_ref() const = 0;
     virtual void sub_ref() const = 0;
protected:
     Base() {}
     ~Base() {}
};

class Derived
{
public:
     static Base * get_instance()
         { return new Derived(); }

     void add_ref() const
         { ++m_ref_count; }
     void sub_ref() const
         { if (--m_ref_count == 0) delete this; }
private:
     Derived() : m_ref_count(1)
     {}
     Derived(const Derived &);
     void operator=(const Derived &);
private:
     mutable int m_ref_count;
};

The idea is to make sure that Derived lifetime is only manipulated via
add_ref/sub_ref and nobody accidentally delete-s it.

--
Eugene

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