From Libvisual wiki

Contents 1 libvisual-cpp 1.1 Release Status 1.2 Developers 1.3 Goals 1.4 Design and Implementation 1.4.1 Naming 1.4.2 Enums 1.4.3 Strings 1.4.4 Functions 1.4.5 Callbacks 1.4.6 Error Handling 1.4.7 Reference Counting 1.4.8 OOP 1.4.9 Collections 1.4.10 Multithreading

libvisual-cpp

Release Status

libvisual-cpp is still in development. A stable release is expected to be available by the end of this year.

In the meantime, you may download libvisual-cpp from CVS.

Developers

• Chong Kai Xiong 'descender' (descender AT phreaker DOT net)

Goals

In no particular order:

• Greater ease-of-use

1. OOP with C++ class constructs
2. Compile-time type safety
3. Work well with the standard library and Boost

• Low overhead

1. Little additional memory requirement
2. Little additional function call overhead.

Design and Implementation

Guiding Principles:

• no naked pointers
• references instead of pointers where possible
• const-correctness

Naming

• All identifiers are placed under the Lv namespace.
• Overloading and templates are used to exclude type names from the C original function identifiers and facilitate generic programming.

Enums

• All enums will have their own types
• All 6 bitwise operators (^, &, |, ^=, &=, |=) are overloaded for enum types that represent flags.

Strings

• All C null-terminated string arguments will be wrapped using std::string.

Functions

• Function call overhead of trivial function wrappers is avoided by inlining.

Callbacks

• Callback function parameters are wrapped with functors so that any of the 2 types of functions may be passed:

1. non-static member functions
2. static member functions, free functions

• For convenience, arguments and return values may be bound to functors.
• Functor adaptors for accepting extra arguments that underlying function do not use or know.

Error Handling

• Wrap all(?) errors in C++ exception classes.
• Exception classes derived from appropriate standard exceptions i.e. std::runtime_error for run-time errors, std::invalid_argument for invalid arguments and so on.
• Macro to switch between error handling options based on a #define. Options include:

1. Throwing exceptions
2. Returning error values
3. Terminate

Reference Counting

• Reference counting is automatically performed using copy constructors, assignment operators and destructors.

OOP

• Mirror VisObject object hierarchy with equivalent C++ class hierarchy.

Collections

• VisCollection-based types will be created with:

1. Template specialization: typedef Lv::Collection<MyObject> MyObjectCollection;
2. Subclassing i.e. deriving from Lv::AbstractCollection.

• Ditto for VisList or VisHashMap based types.
• std::list<>-style interface for VisList
• std::tr1::unordered_map<>-style interface for VisHashMap.
• std::list<>, std::tr1::unordered_map<> combined style interface for VisHashlist.

Multithreading

• Helper objects to acquire and release lock when scope is exited.
• Helper object to log lock acquisition and release.