[vtk-developers] vtk-developers Digest, Vol 158, Issue 21

[David Lonie]

I'm so glad someone brought this up =)

On Fri, Jun 23, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Shawn Waldon <shawn.waldon at kitware.com> wrote:
>  But realistically what it does is
> discourage use of vtkNew.  Most people I talk to say "I would use vtkNew but
> then I have to clutter up my code with GetPointer calls everywhere" and so
> they still use vtkSmartPointer.  Honestly I only used it to clean up
> declarations (the problem discussed earlier in this thread).  Now that we
> can use auto in VTK, I'll probably go back to vtkSmartPointer since it is
> easier to use.

I agree with Shawn. It's an unnecessary hassle to require the Get() to be used.

I suppose I'm just a fan of the design philosophy for C++ about "don't
prevent developers from shooting themselves in the foot." If a dev
doesn't understand VTK's reference counting well enough to understand
that you can't simply return a vtkNew'd pointer without increfing it
first, they're going to have far greater problems using the toolkit
than this.

Besides, you could easily (and safely) return a vtkNew'd pointer from
a function:

vtkObject* function()
{
  vtkNew<vtkObject> obj;
  obj->Register();
  return obj; // If we had implicit conversions, anyway
}

Making the class unwieldly simply so that people don't need to learn
how reference counts work is a poor justification IMO.

Just my 2c,
Dave