Re: [boost] Is there any interest in non-owning pointer-like types?

On Sat, Feb 4, 2017 at 2:59 PM, David Stone wrote:

Using optional does not imply any overhead. You simply provide a specialization for optional. You make optional a friend of observer<T>, and create a private constructor that acts as the back door to allow your type to store a nullptr inside it to represent the empty state. Then the only way to get in this state is through optional, so users of the type never see that such a state is possible.

This is quite true. I did consider this, but for some reason dismissed it. But I guess this optimization would be allowable under the as-if rule http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/as_if? Of course, this is contingent on `observer<T>` becoming part of the C++ standard.

The behavior of operator< is a little trickier. That being said, I do not believe that this type should have operator<. This type is not usable as an iterator, which is the only situation where operator< makes sense for pointer types. Instead, I would just specialize std::less (which I see you delegate to in your operator<) to allow use in std::map. Then the question of the performance of optional's operator< goes away, because it is not defined.

Sounds reasonable. I only defined the operators to allow storage in ordered associative containers, but you are right that this only requires a specialization of `less`. I have a minor gripe with `optional` because you end up having to double dereference to access the underlying object: optional ooi = some_int; **ooi = 42; That said, I am also slightly annoyed at the fact that, after removing implicit conversion from `T&`, there is no neat way to convert an `observer_ptr<T>` to an `observer<T>`. With `optional`, this is not a problem (because of the double dereferencing): optional ooi = some_int; observer<int> oi = *ooi; int i = **ooi; However, I have come to appreciate that syntactic brevity is not always a sign of correct design, and syntax is rarely a compelling justification for a design decision. In this case I believe the double dereference may be warranted. Thanks for your input. It is very useful!