On 5/11/2015 10:25 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:
Hello,
I realize that Boost has Signals library already, but I've implemented a non-intrusive one which approaches the problem differently, and I'm pretty sure that there is no overlap between the two. It turned out more generic than I originally anticipated, so I thought I'd ask if others would find it useful as well.
Specifically I was motivated by wanting to use Qt without MOCing. I asked the Qt community if that was possible which generated several rather annoyed negative responses. :) The issue is that while in Qt it's possible to use any function as a Slot, to define a new Qt signal for an existing Qt type one needs to derive from the Qt type, define the signal (as a member function) and do the MOC dance -- which I wanted to avoid.
The result is a small, non-intrusive signals/slots library that allows objects of any type to be used as signal emitters, e.g. one of the included examples shows how signals can be emitted by a Windows HWND object.
Documentation and source code released under the Boost license can be found here: http://www.revergestudios.com/boost-synapse/.
The documentation says that a signal emitter is a void pointer. Doesn't it need to be a shared_ptr<void> instead, since it must be passed to emit as a weak_pointer ? You might clarify this in the documentation. Instead of: "Boost Synapse does not define its own signal emitter type. Instead, signal emitters are identified by void pointers." you might say: "Boost Synapse does not define its own signal emitter type. Instead, signal emitters are identified by pointers to any type specified as a shared_ptr<void>." It looks like shared_ptr, weak_ptr, and function are C++ standard types and not Boost types, but this is not clarified. I assume that the purpose of having the signal type be a pointer to a function taking some data and returning an incomplete type instead of returning void is to make each signal type unique. But is this really necessary ?