Re: using vector to encapulate a tree - non const copy constructors

From:
"James Kanze" <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
18 Nov 2006 11:47:04 -0500
Message-ID:
<1163847214.679137.231110@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com>
Francis Glassborow wrote:

In article <1163778871.426938.244870@f16g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>, Le
Chaud Lapin <jaibuduvin@gmail.com> writes

That's just it. Technically, you do not know how vector<> is
implemented. You certainly cannot infer that it has a collection of
A*, or even pointer to a not-yet-allocated array of A. Suppose I
replace std::vector with

template <typename X> struct Vector
{
      X buffer[16];
} ;


While not disagreeing with the rest of your post, this part is
wrong. The implementation is not allowed to implement
vector<> like that, well not just like that.


Of course not, since this would require a default constructor.
It would be allowed to define a buffer of unsigned char of the
correct size, and use it as its raw memory as long as the array
was small enough.

Without looking at the requirements in detail I cannot comment
as to whether some variant of the small string optimisation
might be allowable.


I'm pretty sure it would be. Unlike basic_string, however,
vector is allowed to contain objects with non-trivial
destructors, a default constructor is not required, and there
are very definite requirements concerning when constructors are
called. So the "small string optimization" would have to use a
buffer of raw memory (probably with some implementation
dependant trick to ensure proper alignment).

However the standard does require that given:

std::vector<T> vectorof T;

code making vectorofT non-empty

&vectorofT[0] produces a pointer to the first element of a contiguous
array of T


I don't see how that affects the small string optimization.
Current implementations using that optimization in strings also
present the string as contiguous memory.

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