Re: return string - no double allocation

From:
"Alf P. Steinbach" <alfps@start.no>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:23:05 +0100
Message-ID:
<gqbivu$rsa$1@news.motzarella.org>
* Gernot Frisch:

Design: it's generally a bad idea to implement a copy constructor in
terms of assignment. Instead implement assignment in terms of copy
construction.


How can that be done?

DGStr operator=(const DGStr& s)
{
   *this(s);
   return *this;
}

so?


Almost. The most common is the 'swap' idiom.

   DGStr& operator=( DGStr other )
   {
       swap( other );
       return *this;
   }

where 'swap' is a member function that guarantees to swap the contents of *this
with that of the specified DGStr, in constant time, without throwing.

Here the pass-by-value is intentional: the copy is constructed at the call site,
and after the swapping that copy's destructor takes care of deallocating the old
value.

std::swap comes in handy for implementing swap.

Cheers & hth.,

- Alf

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