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Re: Some feedback on scope guards

From: Edward Catmur <ecatmur_at_[hidden]>
Date: Sun, 16 Apr 2023 08:34:29 -0300
On Sun, 16 Apr 2023 at 08:11, Ville Voutilainen <ville.voutilainen_at_[hidden]>
wrote:

> On Sun, 16 Apr 2023 at 13:40, Edward Catmur <ecatmur_at_[hidden]>
> wrote:
> >> > Fine, and how do we specify the facility that such moves have
> undefined/unspecified behavior but the cases we want to allow do? I can't
> see a way.
> >>
> >> We don't. If I want to store these things in a vector and move the
> >> vector around, that's my business. I'll need to disable the elements
> >> if the vector
> >> has been moved. If I want to wrap these things in a shared_ptr after
> >> allocating them dynamically, and then store those shared_ptrs into a
> >> vector,
> >> that's my business, and none of the library's to prevent.
> >
> >
> > And we need to know what happens when you do that, or know that it is
> unspecified. What I'm saying is that the behavior needs to be specified, or
> explicitly unspecified. If the behavior is specified in terms of
> uncaught_exceptions(), that takes care of it, but leaves the coroutine case
> broken.
>
> I fail to see the problem. It's as if you're suggesting that there's
> some unknown specification challenge here, but we have the
> specification
> you speak of already, in the TS.
>

And that specification breaks with coroutines.

>> No library type prevents using it as a subobject, or prevents itself
> >> completely from working with other library types. It sure as hell
> >> matters.
> >
> >
> > std::typeinfo? std::chrono::time_zone?
>
> Yes? Neither of those needs other than pointers to them to work. Scope
> guards are not like them.
> You found two cases that presumably prove my statement wrong, but
> (pointers to) those types can
> be used as subobjects, that works fine, and they work with other
> library types without problems, since
> for them it's truly so that you don't need by-value subobjects of them.
>
> Try harder.
>

And you can take pointers to scope guards. Consider also immovable types
like scoped_lock - those won't work with most library components.

>> > Working well can be dealt with by the vendor since these are library
> types. Wrong - maybe, but this is a scope guard! The name indicates it
> should be used in a scope.
> >> Yeah, which does include packaging them any which way I please and
> >> passing them down to helper functions for further processing,
> >> or just having a collection-bunch of them in a scope, rather than
> >> having to have individual objects of the scope guard type directly,
> >> without
> >> the possibility to bunch them.
> > I've never seen code where that would actually be useful.
>
> Uhh.. you've never seen code that packages multiple individual objects
> into a bunch, to pass them as one object to be processed
> by a helper function? You can't fathom code where you'd take a pack of
> callbacks and wrap scope guards on top of them, variadically?
>

No, since you may as well wrap the lot into a single scope guard.

Yeah, sure, I can show you that example you asked for. In my copious free
> time.
>
> >> The current design in the TS is just fine. It specifies how the
> >> destructor of these things works, and tells you clearly enough what
> >> happens if you move a container of these things around into a scope
> >> that has a different value for uncaught_exceptions() than
> >> the original scope had.
> > It's not fine, because it breaks with coroutines.
>
> Well, gee whizz, that's an acceptable cost, compared to preventing the
> use of scope guards as subobjects, which is not an
> acceptable cost.


Using scope_guard outside block scope is a code smell, though it can be
justified in some rare cases. Using scope_success or scope_failure outside
block scope would not pass code review where I work.

Meanwhile, using scope_success and scope_failure in coroutine block scope
across suspension points is completely natural; the only problem is that it
can break. We should not be adding footguns like that to the standard.

If we have a solution that doesn't do that prevention
> and solves the coroutine problem, I'm all ears.
>

There's Andrey's solution, but the overhead is substantial.

Received on 2023-04-16 11:34:41