SummerOfCodeProposal res

A bit about me

My name is Frank Richter, currently studying Computer Sciences at the University of Jena (that's in Germany).

As far as C++ is concerned, I program in it since at least seven years now. In my spare time I also develop for Crystal Space, an open source 3D engine. While I did a lot in the topics of realtime 3D, OpenGL, shaders and such, I also did (and do) 'low-level' things like cross-platform services and, last, but in this context here now certainly not least, matters of memory optimization.

Current status

• Upon reading the blog post linked in the idea proposal my first thought was to use a proxy class for operator[]. Below a patch that implements it.

Proxy class patch

This builds and, I believe, works, but has a number of not-so-nice issues:

• Some places store return values in t_string&. The idea is to change these to config::proxy_string, as that type should ideally behave like t_string&.
• config::proxy_string can cast to both std::string and t_string.

The first is necessary as t_string can cast to it as well; the second is necessary to support use of a config::proxy_string where a const t_string& is expected. Unfortunately, this introduces an ambiguity in cases where a config::proxy_string is passed to methods that can take either of std::string or t_string. The ambiguity was solved in some places by using .str(). It would also go away when proxy_string operator[] is removed.

• the variables_set class has a member (get_variable_const()) that returns a t_string&. game_state descends from this class; it's get_variable_const() implementation supposedly returns a value from a config. To ensure the ref is valid, the value as a t_string is stored in a map. This is clearly not ideal.

The patch was submitted to the patch tracker: https://gna.org/patch/index.php?1139

Next (technically, first) Steps

• Get rid of t_string& operator[] - could be a proxy class, as above, or like in the initial blog post, a setter function. A way in-between could be to have the proxy class for convenient migration, but mark is a deprecated; instead, promote the usage of the setter. Cases where the proxy class actually introduces ugliness should be fixed manually.
• Assuming that only a limited set of keys is used all keys can be stored in a global "add-only" pool. Individual config instances would only the pointers to the global keys.
• For values consider changing t_string to be backed by a string that is "copy on write", so a single copy is used unless the string is manipulated. silene suggested to store short, untranslatable values inside t_string directly to use the "16 or 24 bytes" it takes up anyway.