Re: C++11 move semantics

[Frank Heckenbach]

Hans Åberg wrote:

> >> We are speaking about different things here: In Yacc grammar one [can't] 
> >> drop the ";".
> > 
> > OK, but how is this relevant here?
> 
> An example of Bison not being Yacc.

Obviously. As I said, nothing about the C++ mode is required for
Yacc compatibility. It just seems gratuitous to me to drop the
default action when it's so easy to implement. -- Actually, even
easier now that I use std::variant; I was able to unify this code
with the non-variant version to always do the default action when no
user action is given, and always default-initialize $$ when there is
one, in order to avoid any illusion that there is a pre-action, and
the relavant code is now shorter than before.

> >>> so expensive. Also bison by default reserve()s 200 entries, and I
>
> It might be remnant from the C parser.

Even if so, it's still a good idea to keep it, so vector basically
never actually needs to reallocate.

> > I looked into the code. Just adding std::move seems rather easy, but
> > finding out if a $n is mentioned several times might be tricky on
> > the m4 level, might require changes to Bison itself.
> > 
> > And the question remains what to do then. One possibility would be
> > an option auto-move or such. If not set, std::move is not inserted;
> > if set it's always inserted, but Bison warns if $n is mentioned
> > several times.
> > 
> > Then there might need to be a way to suppress this warning for
> > individual cases which gets complicated again. Or there is no such
> > way, and if needed, one has to work around it. That would work fine
> > with my grammar -- for the few such rules as mentioned above I could
> > just move $n to temporaries. But for grammars that have this more
> > often, this might get cumbersome, so I'm not sure how useful such an
> > option would be to others.
> > 
> > Any ideas?
> 
> No ideas. I suspect moves are from the point of view just an
> optimization, lacking features for application like this.

Well, std::move works alright. The only rule to remember (which is
obvious when you consider what moving means) is that you cannot move
from the same thing twice. To a C++11 programmer, that's natural.
The question is just if we can make Bison do that automatically, at
least in most cases.

> >>> I did so at first, but then I realized that Bison would have to
> >>> replace "$$ =" with "return" which is dangerous as I said. So it
> >>> would probably be easier in the long run to leave this to the
> >>> programmer. (But again, I doubt this will be implemented.)
> >> 
> >> And maybe the C++ standard does not admit one relying on it.
> > 
> > I think move on return (when the target is a local variable or
> > parameter) is guaranteed in recent standards (C++14 or so).
> 
> Then it might be possible.

Only for "$$ =" in the best case. IMHO it's only a few rules (such
as "'(' expr ')'") that would really profit from this (apart from
the default action which I've already covered), so I don't think
that's worth the effort.

> It would be enough for just keeping track of the semantic value in
> the parser. It is more optimal to do the deallocations by hand as
> in the C parser if one wants to optimize.

Well, that's what I've been doing so far, hope to change it. As I
said, my parser can suffer a little inefficiency (though with move
semantics, it won't even have to), but the rest of my program must
not.

> >> I am not sure why you need it in the parser. Just put the object
> >> on the heap and use shared_ptr in the semantic value, but nowhere
> >> else.
> > 
> > That's exactly what I'd need a release method for when transferring
> > objects from the parsed structures to the rest of the program.
> 
> Can't you use the shared_ptr::reset function?

Nope, reset destroys the object. See the stackoverflow page I linked
in my first mail for a discussion. There doesn't seem to be a "nice"
way, and that seems to be intentional.

Regards,
Frank