On Tuesday 22 May 2007 21:19:11 Jeffrey Faust wrote:
My only complaint about boost::optional is that it is very difficult to see values in the debugger. I brought this up in a discussion at BoostCon, and Jeff Garland suggested I submit a patch.
Well, I have a patch. The change introduces a new private T* m_value and protected method update_debug() which sets this variable. The variable is only visible when building debug, and the method is empty in non-debug. From there, I simply call update_debug() in each public method that changes the storage.
The final result is that debuggers can see the variable data by looking at opt.m_value. When not set, the value is null.
I'm not against making things debugger-friendly, but not at the cost of performance. Also, I find the objections about having different layouts valid. Other than that, I know that at least GDB and MS debugger can be scripted and that it might be a different approach that is non-intrusive. Uli