[vtk-developers] Smart pointer declaration macro?

[Aashish Chaudhary]

My response below:

>
> leading to:
>
>  vtkSmartPointer<vtkObject> c = vtkNew<vtkPolyData>();
>
> Beyond that, the verbosity is an artifact of using C++ as a language
> and the non-abbreviated name "vtkSmartPointer".  We could change it
> to something shorter, like "vtkRef", but that will just leave two
> names for the same thing.

I like this suggestion but I think it does not make the code any more
cleaner / readable. I like Tim's suggestion to clean up the API a bit
(if given we are going to create new classes).

I think in the future if ARB decides to break the backward
compatibility for one or more reasons then probably it would be a good
time to do a over haul on how smart pointers are used / created in
VTK.

Just for reference OpenSG (similar to OpenSceneGraph, popular SG in
Germary) (another library that I used) had to do this transition for
the same / similar and related issues and it was little painful.

At that time then we can think about some other pointer types such as
transient pointers (can be used  as a return value for the function),
scope pointers,  true weak pointers and so on.

Just my 2 cents :)


>
> -Brad
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