Re: Please help with testing & improving a StringValue class

From:
"Alf P. Steinbach" <alfps@start.no>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sun, 09 Sep 2007 11:59:33 +0200
Message-ID:
<13e7gtb8m09fk55@corp.supernews.com>
* Gianni Mariani:

Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
...

Comments, ideas, criticism etc. welcome!


Is it thread safe?


As much as any general class. ;-)

I don't believe in adding mutual exclusion to basic operations for a
general purpose class, but I understand the question: with non-mutable
values, it's natural to wonder whether that's in support of threading.

As I see it, adding mutual exclusion everywhere is inefficient, drags in
a lot of threading support code not otherwise needed, and leads to
spaghetti design when people feel "safe" doing anything whatsoever in
threads: IMHO threading code needs to be designed with care, not
accessing variables in other threads willy-nilly.

Cheers,

- Alf

PS: A more serious question: is it slicing safe? Version 01 is not, in
the sense that it's possible to use references or pointers so that one
ends up with a StringValue that's null (with value copied from a
StringValueOrNull). But I'm working on that, namely having
StringValueOrNull and StringValue derive from a common abstract base,
instead of having StringValue derive from StringValueOrNull. Now if
only I could make SFINAE & boost::disable_if work properly! :-)

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