I want to store pointers to one instance of an object in some (two or more) containers. I've met one problem in this idea: how I can handle removing of this object. Objects have rather stormy life (I am talking about game, but I think this situation is not so specific) and can be removed rather often. To my mind this problem is divided into two problems
1.
How should I signal to containers about deletion? In C# I used to create boolean property IsDead in stored objects, so each iteration of the main loop at first finds 'dead' objects and removes them. No circular reference and everything is rather clear :-) Is this technique correct?
2.
Even if I implement this technique in C++ I meet difficulty with calling destructors if this object is in some containers. Even if I create some kind of a field 'IsDead' and remove dead object from all lists, I had to free memory.
After reading some articles I have an idea that I should have one 'main' container with shared_ptr to all my objects, and other containers should store weak_ptr to them, so only main container checks object's status and others look only at shared_ptr. Are my intentions correct or is there another solution?
It sounds like you're looking for shared_ptr<T>.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb982026.aspx
This is a reference counted ptr in C++ that enables easy sharing of objects. The shared_ptr<T> can be freely handed out to several objects. As the shared_ptr instances are copied around and destucted the internal reference counter will be updated appropriately. When all references are removed the underlying data will be deleted.
Related
note: this question is related to weak_ptr usage, but is not about wrapping weak_ptrs.
I am currently evaluating Swig and I have found an "inconvenience" in the usage of the wrappers by the client languages, that I have not found described online and for which I have no satisfactory solution.
In C++ if you have a complex graph of objects that are managed using shared_ptrs, you must take special care when the graph can have a cycle (i.e. if it is not a DAG) or else you will get memory leaks. By that I mean that if you must (cannot avoid) to have a cycle, it must contain at least one weak_ptr. This means that you will have to handle the cases where you cannot lock the weak_ptr, because the related shared_ptr has died. This management is something that one can expect C++ programmers to be used to deal with. Now let's look at what can happen for a user of the wrappers:
So let's take the following example:
object a, held by a shared_ptr, has a shared_ptr to b
object b, held by a shared_ptr, has a weak_ptr to a
The following could happen to a user of the wrapper:
A a
B b = a->GetB()
// here let's suppose that a gets out of scope, so it can be garbage collected
b->GetA() // fails if a has been garbage collected
The failure could be cleanly managed by propagating a C++ exception to the client code (throw if cannot lock the weak_ptr to create a shared_ptr). However this is not idiomatic to Python/C#/Java users: they do not except to have to manually keep some objects alive to access others.
I have a draft of a an alternative solution which involves creating a C++ "Co-Owner" of objects a and b that would be locked by the SWIG wrappers when any of a or b are accessed via the wrappers, thus keeping both a and b alive when any of them is accessed via the wrappers. The downsides are that this starts to look like I am implementing a proto-garbage-collection in C++, also this modifies the C++ implementation & API of objects a & b and finally the objects a & b will have to be notified by the wrappers that they are used via the wrappers (not something I think I can do without patching SWIG to add function calls in constructor and destructor of shadow objects ??).
Have I missed anything ? Is there another solution to this problem ?
Publicly available weak pointers
If weak ownership is actually part of the interface, it is possible to bind extra types manually that exhibit the behavior of weak pointers. In this example they create a type FooWeakPtr providing the relevant interface. But as you can see, this is not taking advantage of the language-specific classes in every language.
Internal weak pointers
If the weak pointers are not part of the interface, then SWIG-generated bindings should not care about them, and treat the bound objects as shared pointers (at least in Python and Java). Therefore, for as long as your objects are available from the other language, you must make sure they all stay alive.
That means it is up to you to design your hierarchy of objects in a way that clients can never face a case where an internal weak pointer is invalid, and that dropping every reference actually leads to the destruction of the hierarchy.
The solution actually resides in the details of your object hierarchy, and SWIG cannot do much about it.
I have a basic design that consists of three classes : A Data class, A Holder class wich holds and manages multiple Data objects, and a Wrapper returned by the Holder wich contains a reference to a Data object.
The problem is that Wrapper must not outlive Holder, or it will contain a dangling reference, as Holder is responsible for deleting the Data objects. But as Wrapper is intended to have a very short lifetime (get it in a function, make some computation on its data, and let it go out of scope), this should not be a problem, but i'm not sure this is a good design.
Here are some solutions i thought about:
-Rely on the user reading the documentation, technically the same thing happens with STL iterators
-Using shared_ptr to make sure the data lasts long enought, but it feels like overkill
-Make Wrapper verify its Holder still exists each time you use it
-Any idea?
(I hope everyone can understand this, as english is not my native language)
Edit : If you want to have a less theoric approach, this all comes from a little algorithm i'm trying to write to solve Sudokus, the Holder is the grid, the Data is the content of each box (either a result or a temporary supposition), and the Wrapper is a Box class wich contains a reference to the Data, plus additional information like row and column.
I did not originally said it because i want to know what to do in a more general situation.
Only ever returning a Wrapper by value will help ensure the caller doesn't hold onto it beyond the calling scope. In conjunction with a comment or documentation that "Wrappers are only valid for the lifetime of the Holder that created them" should be enough.
Either that or you decide that ownership of a Data is transferred to the Wrapper when the Wrapper is created, and the Data is destroyed along with the Wrapper - but what if you want a to destroy a Wrapper without deleting the Data? You'd need a method to optionally relinquish ownership of the Data back to the Holder.
Whichever you choose, you need to decide what owns (ie: is responsible for the lifetime of) Data and when - once you've done that you can, if you want, use smart pointers to help with that management - but they won't make the design decision for you, and you can't simply say "oh I'll use smart pointers instead of thinking about it".
Remember, if you can't manage heap memory without smart pointers - you've got no business managing heap memory with them either!
To elaborate on what you have already listed as options,
As you suggested, shared_ptr<Data> is a good option. Unless performance is an issue, you should use it.
Never hold a pointer to Data in Wrapper. Store a handle that can be used to get a pointer to the appropriate Data object. Before Data is accessed through Wrapper, get a pointer the Data object. If the pointer is not valid, throw an exception. If the pointer is valid, proceed along the happy path.
I am building a game engine library in C++. A little while back I was using Qt to build an application and was rather fascinated with its use of Implicit Sharing. I am wondering if anybody could explain this technique in greater detail or could offer a simple example of this in action.
The key idea behind implicit sharing seems to go around using the more common term copy-on-write. The idea behind copy-on-write is to have each object serve as a wrapper around a pointer to the actual implementation. Each implementation object keeps track of the number of pointers into it. Whenever an operation is performed on the wrapper object, it's just forwarded to the implementation object, which does the actual work.
The advantage of this approach is that copying and destruction of these objects are cheap. To make a copy of the object, we just make a new instance of a wrapper, set its pointer to point at the implementation object, and then increment the count of the number of pointers to the object (this is sometimes called the reference count, by the way). Destruction is similar - we drop the reference count by one, then see if anyone else is pointing at the implementation. If not, we free its resources. Otherwise, we do nothing and just assume someone else will do the cleanup later.
The challenge in this approach is that it means that multiple different objects will all be pointing at the same implementation. This means that if someone ends up making a change to the implementation, every object referencing that implementation will see the changes - a very serious problem. To fix this, every time an operation is performed that might potentially change the implementation, the operation checks to see if any other objects also reference the implementation by seeing if the reference count is identically 1. If no other objects reference the object, then the operation can just go ahead - there's no possibility of the changes propagating. If there is at least one other object referencing the data, then the wrapper first makes a deep-copy of the implementation for itself and changes its pointer to point to the new object. Now we know there can't be any sharing, and the changes can be made without a hassle.
If you'd like to see some examples of this in action, take a look at lecture examples 15.0 and 16.0 from Stanford's introductory C++ programming course. It shows how to design an object to hold a list of words using this technique.
Hope this helps!
I am having some issues designing the memory management for an Entity-Component system and am having some issues coming up with the detail of the design. Here is what I am trying to do (note that all of these classes except Entity are actually virtual, so will have many different specific implementations):
The Program class will have a container of Entity's. The Program will loop through the Entity's and call update on each of them. It will also have a few SubSystem's, which it will also update on each loop through.
Each Entity will contain two types of Component's. All of them will be owned by a unique_ptr inside the Entity since their lifetime is directly tied to the entity. One type, UpdateableComponent, will be updated when the Entity.update() method is called. The second type SubSystemComponent will be updated from within their respective SubSystem.
Now here are my two problems. The first is that some of the Component's will control the lifetime of their parent Entity. My current idea for this is that Component will be able to call a function parent.die() which would change an internal flag inside Entity. Then after Program finishes looping through its updates, it loops through a second time and removes each Entity which was marked for deletion during the last update. I don't know if this is an efficient or smart way to go about it, although it should avoid the problem of an Entity dieing while its Component's are still updating.
The second issue is that I am not sure how to reference SubSystemComponent's from within SubSystem. Since they are refered to by a unique_ptr from inside Entity, I can't use a shared_ptr or a weak_ptr, and a standard pointer would end up dangling when the Entity owning a component dies. I could switch to a shared_ptr inside the Entity for these, then use a weak_ptr in the SubSystem's, however I would prefer to not do this because the whole point is that Entity completely owns its Component's.
So 2 things:
Can my first idea be improved upon in a meaningful way?
Is there an easy way to implement a weak_ptr sort of functionality with unique_ptr, or should I just switch to shared_ptr and just make sure to not create more than one shared_ptr to the SubSystemComponent's
Can my first idea be improved upon in a meaningful way?
Hard to say without knowing more about the nature of the work being undertaken. For example, you haven't said anything about your use of threads, but it seems your design gives equal priority to all the possible updates by cycling through things in a set sequence. For some things where low latency is important, or there's some useful prioritorisation that would ideally be done, a looping sequence like that isn't good, while other times it's ideal.
There are other ways to coordinate the Component-driven removal of Entities from the Program:
return codes could bubble up to the loop over entities, triggering an erase from the container of Entities,
an Observer pattern or lambda/std::function could allow the Program to specify cleanup behaviour.
Is there an easy way to implement a weak_ptr sort of functionality with unique_ptr,
No.
or should I just switch to shared_ptr and just make sure to not create more than one shared_ptr to the SubSystemComponent's
It sounds like a reasonable fit. You could even wrap a shared_ptr in a non-copyable class to avoid accidental mistakes.
Alternatively - as for Entity destruction above - you could coordinate the linkage between SubSystem and SubSystemComponent using events, so the SubSystemComponent destructor calls back to the SubSystem. An Observer pattern is one way to do this, a SubSystemComponent-side std::function fed a lambda is even more flexible. Either way, the Subsystem removes the SubSystemComponent from its records.
My application problem is the following -
I have a large structure foo. Because these are large and for memory management reasons, we do not wish to delete them when processing on the data is complete.
We are storing them in std::vector<boost::shared_ptr<foo>>.
My question is related to knowing when all processing is complete. First decision is that we do not want any of the other application code to mark a complete flag in the structure because there are multiple execution paths in the program and we cannot predict which one is the last.
So in our implementation, once processing is complete, we delete all copies of boost::shared_ptr<foo>> except for the one in the vector. This will drop the reference counter in the shared_ptr to 1. Is it practical to use shared_ptr.use_count() to see if it is equal to 1 to know when all other parts of my app are done with the data.
One additional reason I'm asking the question is that the boost documentation on the shared pointer shared_ptr recommends not using "use_count" for production code.
Edit -
What I did not say is that when we need a new foo, we will scan the vector of foo pointers looking for a foo that is not currently in use and use that foo for the next round of processing. This is why I was thinking that having the reference counter of 1 would be a safe way to ensure that this particular foo object is no longer in use.
My immediate reaction (and I'll admit, it's no more than that) is that it sounds like you're trying to get the effect of a pool allocator of some sort. You might be better off overloading operator new and operator delete to get the effect you want a bit more directly. With something like that, you can probably just use a shared_ptr like normal, and the other work you want delayed, will be handled in operator delete for that class.
That leaves a more basic question: what are you really trying to accomplish with this? From a memory management viewpoint, one common wish is to allocate memory for a large number of objects at once, and after the entire block is empty, release the whole block at once. If you're trying to do something on that order, it's almost certainly easier to accomplish by overloading new and delete than by playing games with shared_ptr's use_count.
Edit: based on your comment, overloading new and delete for class sounds like the right thing to do. If anything, integration into your existing code will probably be easier; in fact, you can often do it completely transparently.
The general idea for the allocator is pretty much the same as you've outlined in your edited question: have a structure (bitmaps and linked lists are both common) to keep track of your free objects. When new needs to allocate an object, it can scan the bit vector or look at the head of the linked list of free objects, and return its address.
This is one case that linked lists can work out quite well -- you (usually) don't have to worry about memory usage, because you store your links right in the free object, and you (virtually) never have to walk the list, because when you need to allocate an object, you just grab the first item on the list.
This sort of thing is particularly common with small objects, so you might want to look at the Modern C++ Design chapter on its small object allocator (and an article or two since then by Andrei Alexandrescu about his newer ideas of how to do that sort of thing). There's also the Boost::pool allocator, which is generally at least somewhat similar.
If you want to know whether or not the use count is 1, use the unique() member function.
I would say your application should have some method that eliminates all references to the Foo from other parts of the app, and that method should be used instead of checking use_count(). Besides, if use_count() is greater than 1, what would your program do? You shouldn't be relying on shared_ptr's features to eliminate all references, your application architecture should be able to eliminate references. As a final check before removing it from the vector, you could assert(unique()) to verify it really is being released.
I think you can use shared_ptr's custom deleter functionality to call a particular function when the last copy has been released. That way, you're not using use_count at all.
You would need to hold something other than a copy of the shared_ptr in your vector so that the shared_ptr is only tracking the outstanding processing.
Boost has several examples of custom deleters in the shared_ptr docs.
I would suggest that instead of trying to use the shared_ptr's use_count to keep track, it might be better to implement your own usage counter. this way you will have full control over this rather than using the shared_ptr's one which, as you rightly suggest, is not recommended. You can also pre-set your own counter to allow for the number of threads you know will need to act on the data, rather than relying on them all being initialised at the beginning to get their copies of the structure.