Re: Class invariants and implicit move constructors (C++0x)

From:
SG <s.gesemann@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:01:10 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID:
<3bebbe53-cbcb-4d77-99f9-bfedf44ce1b3@v8g2000yqe.googlegroups.com>
On 15 Aug., 21:19, Scott Meyers wrote:

Howard Hinnant wrote:

Example: One can insert into, and erase from vector<Widget>. Thou=

gh

there will be intermediate stages of broken invariants of Widget,
these will not be exposed unless the insert throws. After a normally=

-

ending erase and insert, all Widgets in the vector will have satisfied
invariants.


Unfortunately, any temporaries created for the insert may not.
[...]


Here, Howard was assuming that the destructor was also compiler-
generated.

Maybe, the rules could be just a tad more restrictive. For example,
also inhibiting the generation of move operations in case there is a
user-declared DESTRUCTOR seems like a reasonable idea to me at the
moment.

Consider:
   std::vector<Widget> vw;
   vw.push_back(Widget(x, y, z)); // asserts during destruction of=

 temporary

This piece of code would be okay with the above rule change.

 > the case of ~Widget(), the invariant likely won't matter. However=

 if

 > ~Widget() is defined with an assertion check, then we have a noisy
 > error that can be corrected.

I'm not sure how to correct this noisy error. We don't want to remove the
invariant check from ~Widget, because presumably it's there to detect cor=

rupted

objects.


The easy fix is to write your own move constructor that sets the
mutable cacheIsUpToDate member from the source to false. As
alternative, I suggested to replace the bool type with a class that
wraps a bool and is automatically set to false if you move from it
(see replace_on_move<bool,false>).

Cheers!
SG

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