← Back to team overview

dolfin team mailing list archive

Ownership in general

 

Dag recently discussed issues with object ownership in the context of
Vector and DiscreteFunction. Are there any existing general
conventions for this in DOLFIN? It's not easy to know which function
arguments will be kept references to, which will be assumed ownership
of and later deleted, and which return value pointers you yourself
should assume ownership of.

In the absense of reference counting, the least we should do is agree
on some conventions to make this easier, and be very careful to
document this next to each relevant function. However, doing this
requires some overview of many parts of the code, so it's not quickly
done. I guess this should be thought of during the Function cleanup?

--
Martin


Follow ups