[Insight-developers] Returning a smart pointer or a pointer?

[Karthik Krishnan]

I think tou might as well rework the implementation of the class by
changing the return type to "DeformationFieldType *" from
"DeformationFieldTypePointer", instead of adding another
implementation and deprecating the old one.

Its hard for anyone to be affected by it. The method is not virtual.
SmartPointers are implicitly castable to raw pointers.

Sure someone can actually override a non-virtual function and get away
with most compilers but that's pretty stupid.

Chances are by doing so his method won't even be called from the ITK
framework even now cause it casts classes to
PDEDeformableRegistrationFunction in the framework.

Am I mistaken ?

Thanks
--
karthik

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 1:20 PM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Hauke,
>
> Yes,
> this is what Brad King used to implement the LegacyMacro in VTK,
> that we then ported to ITK.
>
>
> The macro is in lines 666-680 of the file
>
>
>             Insight/Code/Common/itkMacro.h
>
>
> # define itkLegacyMacro(method) class itkLegacyMethodRemoved /* no ';' */
> #elif defined(ITK_LEGACY_SILENT) || defined(ITK_LEGACY_TEST) ||
> defined(CSWIG)
>  // Provide legacy methods with no warnings.
> # define itkLegacyMacro(method) method
> #else
>  // Setup compile-time warnings for uses of deprecated methods if
>  // possible on this compiler.
> # if defined(__GNUC__) && !defined(__INTEL_COMPILER) && (__GNUC__ > 3 ||
> (__GNUC__ == 3 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 1))
> #  define itkLegacyMacro(method) method __attribute__((deprecated))
> # elif defined(_MSC_VER) && _MSC_VER >= 1300
> #  define itkLegacyMacro(method) __declspec(deprecated) method
> # else
> #  define itkLegacyMacro(method) method
> # endif
> #endif
>
>
>
> The open question is whether we are deprecating the method,
> or just alert users/developers that this method carries with
> it some performance penalties...
>
>
> I don't know the answer to this question...
>
>
>
>    Luis
>
>
>
> --------------------
> Hauke Heibel wrote:
>>
>> Hi Luis and Tom,
>>
>> How about deprecated warnings? I have a small sample which worked with gcc
>> 3.4.4, VS cl.exe 14.00 and Intel C++ compiler 9.1. I admit that there might
>> be problems with other compilers since I am not sure if that declspec
>> belongs to the standard. I saw that there also exists a deprecated attribute
>> (http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.3.1/gcc/Function-Attributes.html#Function%20Attributes).
>>
>> Regards,
>> Hauke
>>
>> Here is the sample:
>> ----------------------------
>> class Foo
>> {
>> public:
>>  __declspec(deprecated) void GetDeformationFieldRawPointer(){}
>> };
>>
>> int main(int argc, char*argv[])
>> {
>>  Foo f;
>>  f.GetDeformationFieldRawPointer();
>>  return 0;
>> }
>> ----------------------------
>>
>> Tom Vercauteren wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Luis,
>>>
>>> Thanks for the changes!
>>>
>>> As far as encouraging people to use the raw pointer function, I don't
>>> see a better solution than documenting it as you did.
>>>
>>> Tom
>
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