On Monday, 30 May 2016 12:13:04 MSK Andrzej Krzemienski wrote:
Hi Everyone, I have stumbled upon a problem that I do not know how to address. I would like to seek an advice from the people in this list.
I am trying to make boost::optional resemble std::optional (where it is reasonably easy to achieve). std::optional has this nice and useful "placement" constructor:
std::optionalstd::mutex m {std::in_place};
std::in_place is a tag type, that instructs std::optional to create an object using placement-new syntax, from the provided arguments (zero in the example), without incurring any move construction.
I cannot easily copy 1-to-1 this solution, because in namespace boost name in_place is reserved for the in-place factories: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/libs/utility/in_place_factories.html
If not the typed in-place factories, you could transform in_place to be a namespace scope function object and use it as a tag in the optional constructor. The typed in-place factories ruin the solution though, even if not used by optional.
I could simply go with a different name for a tag, but something tells me it would introduce an unnecessary complications for users that want to migrate from one optional to another. I could hack in-place factories so that they can also be used as a tag, although, I am not sure it is doable in a type-safe manner, and if it would not confuse people to have this boost::in_place do a number of different things.
I could use a different namespace, but again, this might look surprising.I am a bit torn.
I think that would be the best solution. Additionally, I would suggest moving the whole library to its own namespace (e.g. optionals). Then the tag in the library namespace would look more natural. For backward compatibility you could import the optional class template into boost namespace.