[webkit-dev] virtual destructor annotations in subclasses

[Yusuke Suzuki]

While I don’t have any opinion about adding override on methods, I would like to see more `final` annotation in derived classes’ header when the classes are final and inherits something.
In JSC, we leverage this `final` information in `jsCast<>` and `jsDynamicCast` to optimize the generated code[1]. So, annotating `final` on JS classes actually changes the generated code and makes it optimized.

[1]: If the given JS class is annotated as `final`, we can skip traversing subclasses when doing `jsDynamicCast<FinalAnnotatedClass>`. We can use this information by `std::is_final<T>`.

-Yusuke

> On Oct 8, 2019, at 19:15, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 4:24 PM Yury Semikhatsky <yurys at chromium.org <mailto:yurys at chromium.org>> wrote:
> 
> This question came up in a code review where I annotated subclass's destructor with 'override':
> 
> class SuperClass {
> public:
>   virtual ~SuperClass() {}
> };
> 
> class Subclass : public SuperClass {
> public:
>   ~Subclass() override;
> };
> 
> The style guide recommends <https://webkit.org/code-style-guidelines/#overriding-virtual-methods> annotating overriden methods with either 'override' or 'final'. At the same time with a very few exceptions, the vast majority of the subclasses in WebKit annotate their destructors with 'virtual' keyword. It might be because some of the code predates c++11 and virtual was the default choice back then. In any case it prevents the compiler from generating errors when super destructor is accidentally not made virtual.
> 
> So my question is if there is a reason to exempt destructors from the above rule and mark them virtual in subclasses or they should be annotated with override/final similar to other virtual methods?
> 
> In the latter case we could update existing code once  by automatically generating fix with clang-tidy.
> 
> I don't have an opinion either way about the actual style but I'm against adding override everywhere en masse the same way we don't land a bunch of whitespace or other style tidy ups. If we were to decide that we want to add override, that should happen over time as people touch different classes and files.
> 
> - R. Niwa
> 
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