On 24.06.2012, at 00:56, Robert Ramey wrote:
Daniel James wrote:
On 22 June 2012 20:41, Robert Ramey <ramey@rrsd.com> wrote:
Well, shared_ptr has evolved. The interface has remained mostly constant, but the internals have changed quite a lot, which has caused some issues, particularly on more obscure platforms.
lol - that's the way it's suppose to be.
Time for a story. When I first made the serialization library, I couldn't serialize a shared_ptr. In order to do it I needed for shared_ptr to include friend::serialization. I asked Peter to do this and refused in a pretty abrupt way. This really annoyed me. After all, it was no big deal for him to add this one line!!!. His point was that by doing this it would tie his hands in the future implementation of shared_ptr. After some time I came to understand why he was right and I was wrong. As you can imagine this is sort of a rare event. I know it's not exactly the same as the current situation but it's similar in my view.
I completely disagree. They're not at all similar. You asked him to expose the implementation details of shared_ptr to you, a consumer of his library. By doing this, his library internals would have become interface, blocking change. Every implementation change would have been an interface change. The change to throw_exception didn't do any such thing. It didn't change the interface. It didn't expose implementation details. All it did was change the implementation of an existing interface in a compatible (modulo bugs, and tightening the compile-time checking in a place where it was previously too lenient) way, and add a small dependency on a part of Boost.Exception along the way. Sebastian