Re: [boost] Improving the assignment operators of various Boost types

on Wed Sep 10 2008, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

One downside is that self-assignment is made suboptimal. My typical operator= implementation is:

T& operator= (T const& that) { if (this != &that) T(that).swap(*this); return *this; }

Not sure, however, if it is critical enough.

IMO it is not only non-critical, but the extra little bit of complexity involved in worrying about self-assignment is slightly dangerous, and it pessimizes the usual case (non-self-assignment) by adding a test and branch. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com