Re: [boost] Interest in non-intrusive signal/slot lib?

On 5/16/2015 2:20 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 7:09 AM, Edward Diener wrote:

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On 5/11/2015 10:25 PM, Emil Dotchevski wrote:

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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:

emit<> takes a void pointer, emit_weak<> takes a weak pointer. I have updated the documentation, I believe the new introduction and the simple example it presents are much more understandable now, thanks to the initial feedback I'm getting.

The link in the documentation in 'Questions and Answers" to: Read "Smart Pointer Programming Techniques" to learn more is broken. I can find it in the Boost doc but others might not.

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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 ?

It is necessary so that if you have:

typedef struct button_down_(*button_down)(int x, int y);

you can tell it apart from

typedef struct button_up_(*button_up)(int x, int y);