[webkit-dev] Type checking / casting helpers

[Sam Weinig]

That also sounds like reasonable behavior for something called cast<>() to me. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 2, 2014, at 5:01 PM, Benjamin Poulain <benjamin at webkit.org> wrote:
> 
> downcast<> fails if you do a useless cast/upcast.
> 
> Benjamin
> 
>> On 10/2/14, 4:47 PM, Sam Weinig wrote:
>> This all looks wonderful!
>> 
>> One question though, why downcast<>(…)? Will we be adding an upcast<>()
>> function? Since the answer is probably no, could we just call this
>> cast<>(…)?
>> 
>> - Sam
>> 
>>> On Sep 25, 2014, at 11:11 AM, Chris Dumez <cdumez at apple.com
>>> <mailto:cdumez at apple.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> I started working on automatically generating the type *casting*
>>> helpers for HTML/SVG/MathML Elements (e.g. toHTMLDivElement()). Until
>>> now, we were generating only the type *checking* helpers using
>>> make_names.pl (e.g. isHTMLDivElement()). The type *casting* helpers
>>> had to be manually defined using NODE_TYPE_CASTS() macro.
>>> 
>>> The type casting helpers are now automatically generated for most
>>> types. Part of the solution involved using a templated function for
>>> type casting because the types are forward-declared and we needed to
>>> do a static_cast<>() (a reinterpret_cast<>() could be used with
>>> forward declarations but wouldn’t be safe due to multiple inheritance).
>>> 
>>> I initially had macros in place so that toHTMLDivElement() would still
>>> work and would be equivalent to downcast<HTMLDivElement>(). The
>>> feedback I received is that we should get rid of these macros and just
>>> use is<HTMLDivElement>() / downcast<HTMLDivElement>() everywhere.
>>> The new style is very close to C++’s is_class<T>() and Boost’s
>>> polymorphic_downcast<T>().
>>> 
>>> I actually started updating the code to do this but I should have
>>> emailed webkit-dev about this beforehand. I apologize for sending this
>>> message a bit late.
>>> 
>>> Please let me know if you have feedback / concerns / questions about
>>> this change. I hope that this email gives you a better understanding
>>> of why I am making this change.
>>> 
>>> As I said before, the code base is not fully ported yet so the current
>>> situation is not necessarily pretty. I will try and go through the
>>> transition as fast as I can, provided that people don’t raise any
>>> concerns about this.
>>> 
>>> Please also note that these new helpers still catch unnecessary type
>>> checks / casts. As a matter of fact, those are now caught at build
>>> time instead of linking time and should give you a nice “Unnecessary
>>> type check” / “Unnecessary type cast” static assertion.
>>> 
>>> Also note that the plan is to get rid of TYPE_CAST_BASE() macro
>>> entirely and extend is<>() / downcast<>() to all types, not just Nodes.
>>> 
>>> Kr,
>>> --
>>> Chris Dumez - Apple Inc.
>>> Cupertino, CA
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>