Re: Equivalent of boost::val?

From:
Alberto Ganesh Barbati <AlbertoBarbati@libero.it>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Mon, 31 Dec 2007 01:06:07 CST
Message-ID:
<D3Jdj.204484$%k.340620@twister2.libero.it>
Alberto Ganesh Barbati ha scritto:

Al ha scritto:

Hi there,

I have a function that takes a const reference. Say

void foo(const int& i);

I want to execute this function in a separate thread; I can use
boost::bind to do so. E.g.:

// ...
const int i = 5;
boost::bind(foo, i);

The above works fine in the absence of threads. However, when executed
in a separate thread, the current thread's stack will have most likely
disappeared already (the parent function does not / can not wait() on
it). So foo would receive garbage or worse.

One solution is to change foo to take `i' by value, but this is (a)
sometimes not possible, and (b) not as clean from a design point of
view. IMO it isn't foo's problem that it is being called asynchronously.

A second solution is to create a dummy wrapper function which takes `i'
by value, and then calls foo. This is too verbose for my tastes.

So, I was wondering if there is a language or boost way of doing
something like:

boost::bind(foo, boost::val(i));

So that `i' is copied over to the other thread's stack instead of being
passed by reference. In a sense, the reverse of boost::ref.


Yes, there is. It's:

 boost::bind(foo, boost::cref(i));

where cref stands for const reference. For a non-const reference, just
use boost::ref. See http://boost.org/doc/html/ref.html for details.


Oops, I seems that I answered the exact opposite of what you requested.
I apologize for the noise.

The correct answer is that you don't need any such thing as boost::val,
because

  boost::bind(foo, i);

always stores i by value, regardless of foo() taking an int or const
int& parameter. See http://boost.org/libs/bind/bind.html#Purpose for
reference, in particular, the sentence:

"For example, in the following code:

int i = 5;

bind(f, i, _1);

a copy of the value of i is stored into the function object. boost::ref
and boost::cref can be used to make the function object store a
reference to an object, rather than a copy"

HTH,

Ganesh

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