[webkit-dev] Moving from WTF::Optional to std::optional

[Darin Adler]

Thanks for pointing that out, Chris.

This advice goes beyond std::optional, by the way. For anything that we move from, there are two operations at are intended to be safe, from a C++ language and library design point of view: destroying the object and overwriting it by assigning a new value. If our code relies on doing anything else after the object is moved from, like examining the value after the old value is moved out, please use std::exchange to set the new value while moving the old value out. This even applies to large-seeming objects like HashMap, which I will note is not large: in release builds a HashMap is implemented as a single pointer to a structure on the heap and a new empty HashMap is a null pointer.

— Darin

Sent from my iPad

> On Jun 1, 2021, at 10:01 PM, Chris Dumez <cdumez at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Another thing Darin didn’t mention but I think people should be careful about:
> The move constructor for std::optional does not clear the is-set flag (while the one for WTF::Optional did).
> 
> As a result, you will be having a very bad time if you do a use-after-move of a std::optional. Please make sure to use std::exchange() instead of WTFMove() if you want to leave to std::optional in a clean state for reuse later.
> 
> Chris Dumez
> 
>>> On Jun 1, 2021, at 8:54 PM, Darin Adler via webkit-dev <webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org> wrote:
>>> 
>> Hi folks.
>> 
>> We’re getting rid of the WTF::Optional class template, because, hooray, std::optional is supported quite well by all the C++17 compilers we use, and we don’t have to keep using our own special version. Generally we don’t want to reimplement the C++ standard library when there is not a significant benefit, and this is one of those times.
>> 
>> Here are a few considerations:
>> 
>> 1) Since https://commits.webkit.org/238290@main, if you use Optional<> by mistake instead of std::optional<>, your code won’t compile. (Unless you are writing code for ANGLE, which has its own separate Optional<>.)
>> 
>> 2) If you want to use std::optional, include the C++ standard header, <optional>, or something that includes it. In a lot of cases, adding an include will not be required since it’s included by widely-used headers like WTFString.h and Vector.h, so if you include one of those are covered. Another way to think about this is that if your base class already uses std::optional, then you don’t need to include it.
>> 
>> 3) Once the patch in https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226437 lands, includes of <wtf/Forward.h> won’t forward declare optional, and includes of <wtf/Optional.h> won’t do anything at all.
>> 
>> — Darin
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