On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan.akhg...@gmail.com> wrote: > What goal would this achieve? I don't understand why it's OK to ignore the > return value of a function which returns an "already AddRef'ed" object from > a conceptual perspective.
You might want the effect of the function but not care about the object it returns. Or, you might just want to know that the object is not null, or compare to some other object, or pass it to a function, or something else that doesn't involve keeping a named reference to it. Currently you have to explicitly construct a temporary nsCOMPtr (named or unnamed) in all of these cases, but I don't see why you should have to. > already_AddRefed already has a constructor from T* which would not addref. > Essentially this will mean not supporting dont_AddRef() any more. Why is > that a good idea? It would allow returning a raw pointer directly without having to create an nsCOMPtr. This saves a line of code in a lot of places. > This I can get behind, but I'm not sure how useful it is without the other > parts of your proposal. It's not useful at all if already_AddRefed asserts in its destructor if the pointer it holds is not null. It would still be useful to have that part of the proposal and this, without adding any extra implicit conversions. > Honestly I'm struggling to decide which problems we _should_ solve here. I > almost always prefer more explicit syntax (for example, having to type > .forget()) when it comes to things such as ownership transfers. It makes it > easier to spot things when reading the code, and it makes the author more > conscious of what they're doing. I also think that you're essentially > trying to eliminate the concept of a helper object that acts as a pipe of > sorts to deliver the information that there is an ownership transfer > happening by making already_AddRefed and nsCOM/RefPtr indistinguishable. > Neither of these seem like improvements to me. I'm curious to know what > others think about this. Hmm, okay. I was coming from the perspective that it's better to make things happen automatically without the coder having to think about ownership. But if people think explicit statements of ownership transferal are preferable to automatic ones, this sort of change doesn't improve matters. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
