FreeLists / haiku-appserver / [haiku-appserver] Re: private development

["Stephan Assmus" <superstippi@xxxxxx>]

> > Inlines ? :)
> 
>       To a certain extent. There are some inlines in the server, there 
> will 
> be more, but they cannot spread across files (.o) AFAIK. For example, 
> RooLayer really has to modify region members of Layer class, if it 
> were 
> to count how much of times RooLayer would access Layer's public 
> methods 
> just for getting a pointer to the object I'm sure your counter would 
> go 
> out of scale. :-) There is no need to copy objects internal to Layer, 
> we 
> just don't need that because we want to keep our data on a per Layer 
> basis. And if we return a pointer/reference to a private member, what 
> is 
> the point in that public GET method?
>       There are other classes which are closely tied together, like: 
> ServerWindow/WinBorder/Layer.
> 
>       As much as I want I cannot pull out certain 'friend's.

There certainly is good use for "friend". Then there is places where 
"friend" can be used, but should be avoided in favor of a cleaner (and 
more flexible) design. "more flexible" in this sense means "easier to 
adopt later, should the need arise". Now, for read only access, there 
should be no speed difference between the following function (in the .h 
!)

inline const SomeClass* GetInstance() const { return fInstance; }

and accessing the member directly. (I hope you didn't read over the 
"read access" bit.) And just while I was working today on 
CursorHandler, I was able to remove all such friend stuff *without* any 
speed change.

Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Let's go through the source 
and replace all this", we have more urgent things to do. I'm just 
trying to tell you that it's better to avoid this where possible in the 
future and should we happen to refactor some part of the code for other 
reasons, we could keep this in mind and remove unnecessary occurances 
of private member access. As I said, I did so with CursorHandler as an 
example.

Best regards,
-Stephan