"Thorsten Ottosen" <nesotto@cs.aau.dk> writes:
"Jeremy Maitin-Shepard" <jbms@cmu.edu> wrote in message news:87acjedijx.fsf@jbms.ath.cx...
"Thorsten Ottosen" <nesotto@cs.aau.dk> writes:
reason to use std::vector. I do not think the additional safety provided is worth the cost of this overhead.
doesn't the overhead depend on the amount of data sent?
I suppose that is true. If a vector must be passed to the receive function, then programs using this library will either have to use an std::vector for any buffers used for receive, which is annoying for users that would prefer to use a different data structure for a buffer, and has the additional overhead of a dynamically allocated buffer and the additional storage std::vecetor requires for the size, capacity, etc.
the space required by vector is 3 words. that is not much for many purposes.
Well, I agree it is not a large amount of overhead given certain usage patterns. But note that requiring either a vector or a static array prevents reading directly into a memory-mapped region. It is also not nearly as convenient to directly read a structure or non-char type without the memory-range interface.
some additional safety, while introducing a more complex and less generic interface.
how is passing 1 agument instead of two going to be more complex? is it because you can't get the size wrong? :-)
Well, more complex in the sense that the operation itself just needs a memory range, but with this interface you can't just pass it a memory range, but rather must pass it something that consists of more than just a memory range. I suppose complex is not a great term to use. [snip]
right. so by passing char (&)[N] you can check that the size argument is not too big. with void* you're just lost.
Well, I admit this safety is rather handy, but I doubt this interface would be used much, since it is not very common to pass arrays around as a reference to static-sized array, so even if the user has a static-sized array, it might not be of the appropriate type at the point where receive/read is called. -- Jeremy Maitin-Shepard