This patch replaces the former prominent use of pointers by references
wherever feasible. This has the following benefits:
* The contract between caller and callee becomes more obvious. When
passing a reference, the contract says that the argument cannot be
a null pointer. The caller is responsible to ensure that. Therefore,
the use of reference eliminates the need to add defensive null-pointer
checks at the callee site, which sometimes merely exist to be on the
safe side. The bottom line is that the code becomes easier to follow.
* Reference members must be initialized via an object initializer,
which promotes a programming style that avoids intermediate object-
construction states. Within core, there are still a few pointers
as member variables left though. E.g., caused by the late association
of 'Platform_thread' objects with their 'Platform_pd' objects.
* If no pointers are present as member variables, we don't need to
manually provide declarations of a private copy constructor and
an assignment operator to avoid -Weffc++ errors "class ... has
pointer data members [-Werror=effc++]".
This patch also changes a few system bindings on NOVA and Fiasco.OC,
e.g., the return value of the global 'cap_map' accessor has become a
reference. Hence, the patch touches a few places outside of core.
Fixes#3135
The patch adjust the code of the base, base-<kernel>, and os repository.
To adapt existing components to fix violations of the best practices
suggested by "Effective C++" as reported by the -Weffc++ compiler
argument. The changes follow the patterns outlined below:
* A class with virtual functions can no longer publicly inherit base
classed without a vtable. The inherited object may either be moved
to a member variable, or inherited privately. The latter would be
used for classes that inherit 'List::Element' or 'Avl_node'. In order
to enable the 'List' and 'Avl_tree' to access the meta data, the
'List' must become a friend.
* Instead of adding a virtual destructor to abstract base classes,
we inherit the new 'Interface' class, which contains a virtual
destructor. This way, single-line abstract base classes can stay
as compact as they are now. The 'Interface' utility resides in
base/include/util/interface.h.
* With the new warnings enabled, all member variables must be explicitly
initialized. Basic types may be initialized with '='. All other types
are initialized with braces '{ ... }' or as class initializers. If
basic types and non-basic types appear in a row, it is nice to only
use the brace syntax (also for basic types) and align the braces.
* If a class contains pointers as members, it must now also provide a
copy constructor and assignment operator. In the most cases, one
would make them private, effectively disallowing the objects to be
copied. Unfortunately, this warning cannot be fixed be inheriting
our existing 'Noncopyable' class (the compiler fails to detect that
the inheriting class cannot be copied and still gives the error).
For now, we have to manually add declarations for both the copy
constructor and assignment operator as private class members. Those
declarations should be prepended with a comment like this:
/*
* Noncopyable
*/
Thread(Thread const &);
Thread &operator = (Thread const &);
In the future, we should revisit these places and try to replace
the pointers with references. In the presence of at least one
reference member, the compiler would no longer implicitly generate
a copy constructor. So we could remove the manual declaration.
Issue #465
This patch reduces the number of exception types by facilitating
globally defined exceptions for common usage patterns shared by most
services. In particular, RPC functions that demand a session-resource
upgrade not longer reflect this condition via a session-specific
exception but via the 'Out_of_ram' or 'Out_of_caps' types.
Furthermore, the 'Parent::Service_denied', 'Parent::Unavailable',
'Root::Invalid_args', 'Root::Unavailable', 'Service::Invalid_args',
'Service::Unavailable', and 'Local_service::Factory::Denied' types have
been replaced by the single 'Service_denied' exception type defined in
'session/session.h'.
This consolidation eases the error handling (there are fewer exceptions
to handle), alleviates the need to convert exceptions along the
session-creation call chain, and avoids possible aliasing problems
(catching the wrong type with the same name but living in a different
scope).
This patch cleans up the thread API and comes with the following
noteworthy changes:
- Introduced Cpu_session::Weight type that replaces a formerly used
plain integer value to prevent the accidental mix-up of
arguments.
- The enum definition of Cpu_session::DEFAULT_WEIGHT moved to
Cpu_session::Weight::DEFAULT_WEIGHT
- New Thread constructor that takes a 'Env &' as first argument.
The original constructors are now marked as deprecated. For the
common use case where the default 'Weight' and 'Affinity' are
used, a shortcut is provided. In the long term, those two
constructors should be the only ones to remain.
- The former 'Thread<>' class template has been renamed to
'Thread_deprecated'.
- The former 'Thread_base' class is now called 'Thread'.
- The new 'name()' accessor returns the thread's name as 'Name'
object as centrally defined via 'Cpu_session::Name'. It is meant to
replace the old-fashioned 'name' method that takes a buffer and size
as arguments.
- Adaptation of the thread test to the new API
Issue #1954
Norman Feske
Alexander Boettcher