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Have you looked at the (proposed) Boost.Move library by Ion (available from the sandbox)? [...]
No, I wasn't aware of its existence. I haven't seen it mentioned on this list in the last couple weeks, is it under review for official acceptance?
AFAIK, it is in the review queue.
Ah, excellent. As soon as it's approved, I'll be happy to take advantage of it.
I understand your hesitation. [...] I think the advantages that move emulation has over copy-on-write (better performance, simpler implementation, thread safety) outweigh its disadvantages (the framework built around boost::rv<T> is still somewhat experimental), so I would urge you to take a look at it in the near future.
Certainly. It should allow XInt to run at copy-on-write speeds, even in thread-safe mode -- a major improvement, and one that I'd jump at.
Not sure what you're referring to by "suggestions that it relies on the compiler to somehow recognize it"...can you elaborate?
I finally tracked down the reference. From the "Thread Management" documentation page of Boost.Thread: [...]
Right, *containers* (not compilers) must detect that move emulation layer. So COW does have an additional advantage: better performance with non-move-aware containers.
Yes, exactly. I'm not sure what's involved with making a container move-aware, but I'm fairly certain that the STL's containers aren't at present. I don't know whether the Boost.Move library will suffer from the same limitation.
A suggestion (perhaps not a good one): replace the thread-safe implementation of xint::integer with a move-aware one, and allow either to be chosen via preprocessor defines.
If Boost.Move doesn't have the limitation mentioned above, then I'll probably get rid of the copy-on-write stuff completely. It wouldn't have any advantage that I can think of, at least for the moment.
The choice of using COW or move emulation might be regarded more as an implementation issue, but (I'm guessing) will probably be brought up again during review.
I think I can defend the decision if it is. :-)
I will try to take a look at the rest of the library shortly.
Thanks. I appreciate the feedback. - -- Chad Nelson Oak Circle Software, Inc. * * * -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkuuq+sACgkQp9x9jeZ9/wQrbwCgySb5iD38QmEldkYWePd4AS78 ROYAoKfbtVIJHZwJ8VjBNHS89gtIPKZe =lqiF -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----