Subject: Re: [boost] [ Interest? ] [ out_ptr ] Tiny C++ Abstraction for C-Style Output Pointers
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-07-03 04:15:56
On 3/07/2018 14:42, ThePhD wrote:
> This does not have any other use case than C and COM-Style API
> interoperability: both `out_ptr` and `inout_ptr` and streamlined interfaces
> purely for this purpose and to make writing against such APIs more
> pleasant, more performant, and (most of all) more developer-time scale-able
> than alternative approaches such as wrapping all such initialization-style
> functions in C++-isms.
Purely for bikeshedding purposes a name like c_out_ptr might be better
in that case.
When initially seeing "out_ptr" and the syntax in your original email,
at first glance it looked like the intent was as a reference wrapper
annotation (to make it more obvious at the call site that the pointer
will be modified on return), rather than the typical "solution" of using
an /*out*/ comment or similar non-functional and non-checked annotation.
(I suppose you can use std::ref for that purpose, but the intent is less
clear. And perhaps less necessary once compilers and libraries start
using multiple return values via structured binding.)