RE: Of Bounties and Mercenaries

["Stephan T. Lavavej" <stl at caltech dot edu>]

[Alexandre Oliva]
> It doesn't take care of cycles, though, and they're quite
> pervasive in GCC.

Cycles are the standard objection to my argument.

It also completely misses the point.  I advocate using shared_ptr (a
reference counted pointer) to hold noncopyable resource managers - that
doesn't introduce cycles.

If you have a data structure which has cycles, then you should encapsulate
it.  For example, std::list is a doubly linked list and hence has cycles of
pointers inside of it.  But the user of std::list doesn't have to know or
care about that.

Manual memory management is a reasonable thing to do, as long as it stays
confined to the constructor, destructor, and methods of a single class that
needs to do something exotic.  (Of course, the same class can use vectors
and whatnot to do mundane things.)

Stephan T. Lavavej
http://nuwen.net