I've floated Jonathan's idea on SG14 yesterday. I think it's interesting, and I'd go for it (I don't mind writing a make_function-style factory function for lambdas / to make sure the static_assert check is there without spelling it out every time), but I also hear it only solves part of the problem for at least some of them.

In fact, my understanding is that some need an inplace_function<F,Sz> with a configurable buffer size such that they can just use a bigger buffer if need be instead of having no fallback if std::function would allocate.

In practice, there will be desire for both a way to statically assert that there would be no allocation (still a good idea, thanks!), and an alternative mechanism with a compile-time controllable buffer. I'll let people discuss it a bit, but I expect there will be papers for both.

Cheers!

Le mar. 4 oct. 2022 à 04:47, Mathias Stearn <redbeard0531+isocpp@gmail.com> a écrit :


On Mon, 3 Oct 2022, 19.52 Jonathan Wakely via Lib, <lib@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:


On Mon, 3 Oct 2022, 18:21 Patrice Roy via Lib, <lib@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:
Yeah,  floated the idea of exposing the size at which SBO threshold is set (through traits or something similar) thinking this would do the job (people could use std::function on their own function objects and static_assert on that object's size begin sufficiently small), but this did not get much traction yet; there seems to be more appetite (if I read SG14's wishes well) for a never-allocating cousin of std::function, at least so far... Discussions on this topic are not closed yet, so we'll see.


What about making the constructor conditionally noexcept? The implementation knows whether a given type will be stored on the heap, and if that type can be constructed without throwing, so can easily expose that.

What people care about is a property of the constructor, so why not make it part of the constructor signature?

You can static assert is_nothrow_constructible.

One problem is that you would need to wrap it in something to make it usable. Because lambdas are unutterable unique types you can't cleanly separate the construction of the function from the static assertion, especially if you want to stay in expression space (I hate reading code that declares used-once lambda variables rather than defining them in the argument position).

If you had that, you could easily declare a subclass of std::function which only declared a forwarding constructor with the nothrow constraint. I think that would make it a lot more ergonomic. But then that raises the question of if you need to do that for it to be usable (in some domains) why not just standardize std::noalloc_function (and noalloc_unique_function I guess) so it can be used as a vocab type?


That said, we've made our implementation of UniqueFunction always allocate and just hold a unique_ptr<Impl> because a) the smaller object and cheaper moves are nice if you have a fast allocator, and b) we found it was very common for lambdas to capture std::functions/UniqueFunctions, which means that no matter how big the SBO size it would need to allocate anyway. So we wouldn't have a use for that type, although I understand that others have different tradeoffs that would make it indispensable.





Le lun. 3 oct. 2022 à 12:40, Ben Craig <ben.craig@ni.com> a écrit :

Are there any examples of implementations that cause allocations, syscalls, or non-deterministic behavior for std::function when it is used with a function pointer, stateless lambda, or std::reference_wrapper?  Is that std::function implementation claiming to be standards conforming?

Best I can tell, std::function is already specified to meet these requirements as best as can be done with the current specification techniques.

My suspicion is that the reluctance to use std::function is based off of some combination of general STL fear, and possibly some other requirements (e.g. user controllable small buffer optimization (SBO) instead of implementation tuned SBO).

 

From: Lib <lib-bounces@lists.isocpp.org> On Behalf Of Björn Andersson via Lib
Sent: Monday, October 3, 2022 11:58 AM
To: sg14@lists.isocpp.org
Cc: Björn Andersson <bjorn.andersson@ictech.se>; lib@lists.isocpp.org; Patrice Roy <patricer@gmail.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [isocpp-lib] [SG14] std::function

 

Den ons 21 sep. 2022 kl 03:07 skrev Patrice Roy via SG14 <sg14@lists.isocpp.org>:

Indeed, this type is part of a set of requests SG14 is working on these days.

 

The problem (for low-latency people) is that there's no programmatic way to know, in user code, if a given std::function instantiation will or will not allocate, so that makes this type unusable for some use cases (in particular, many game development companies will not touch std:function precisely for this reason; they don't just need an optimization, they need a guarantee).

 

 

Incidentally, this is exactly what the safety-critical people need as well: Not just the performance, but the guarantee of no syscall/deterministic behaviour.

 

Thanks,

Björn

 

 

Cheers!

 

Le mar. 20 sept. 2022 à 12:19, Arthur O'Dwyer via Lib <lib@lists.isocpp.org> a écrit :

On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 9:22 AM Bjarne Stroustrup via Lib <lib@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

I thought we had a variant of std::function that didn't allocate on free
store for simple functions; it didn't make it for C++20? Is it still in
process? and if so where would I look for the current state of the proposal.

 

[cc: SG14]

SG14 has implemented, and I maintain, a type-erased `stdext::inplace_function<void(), Capacity, Align>` based on an informal proposal by Carl Cook in 2016:

 

It has never had a P-numbered proposal, and the area hasn't seen any movement that I'm aware of since circa 2018.

 

https://github.com/WG21-SG14/SG14/issues/125 inspired the implicit-move changes in C++20 (P1155 More Implicit Move).

https://github.com/WG21-SG14/SG14/issues/150 is still an important practical issue, where I happen to believe that the STL has chosen the wrong default as usual, and why I stopped caring much about the introduction of new type-erased types into the STL and started evangelizing type erasure as a technique so that people can just write their own.

 

HTH,

Arthur

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