[webkit-dev] Type checking / casting helpers

[Chris Dumez]

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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