Never. Do. This...
I was involved in a product with a large codebase structured like this and it was a maintainability nightmare with no upsides. Multiple attempts were made to move away from this to no avail.
Consider that the code has terrible readability due to no syntax-sugar, the compiler cannot see through the pointers to optimise anything, tooling has no clue what to do with it. On top of that, the syntax is odd and requires any newbies to effectively understand how a c++ compiler works under-the-hood to get anything out of it.
A few years ago Peterpaul developed a lightweight object-oriented system on top of C that was really pleasant to use[0].
No need to pass in the object explicitly, etc.
Doesn't have the greatest documentation, but has a full test suite (e.g., [1][2]).
[0] https://github.com/peterpaul/co2
[1] https://github.com/peterpaul/co2/blob/master/carbon/test/pas...
[2] https://github.com/peterpaul/co2/blob/master/carbon/test/pas...
For people wondering what it looks like without the syntactic sugar of carbon then look here [0]. As far as I can see, there's no support for parametric polymorphism.
0. https://github.com/peterpaul/co2/tree/master/examples/my-obj...
Doesn't look much different than GLib the base for the GTK implementation (and other things in GNOME, the GNU Network _Object_ Model Environment).
I feel like Vala tries to fit in this niche too.
> Having to pass the object explicitly every time feels clunky, especially compared to C++ where this is implicit.
I personally don't like implicit this. You are very much passing a this instance around, as opposed to a class method. Also explicit this eliminates the problem, that you don't know if the variable is an instance variable or a global/from somewhere else.
Agreed, one of the biggest design mistakes in the OOP syntax of C++ (and Java, for that matter) was not making `this` mandatory when referring to instance members.
You must be joking.
That would be a complete redability disaster... at least for C++. Java peeps probably won't even flinch ;)
Mandatory this can also be a major hit in readability. What if you have a class that implements the abc-formula. You get
(- this->b + sqrt(this->b * this->b - 4 this->a * this->c))/(2 * this->a)
(- this->b - sqrt(this->b * this->b - 4 this->a * this->c))/(2 * this->a)
C++ and Java went for the "objects as static closures" route, where it doesn't make any sense to have a `this`. Or, they made them superficially look like static closures, which in hindsight was probably not the best idea. Anyway, Java lets you use explicit `this`, I don't recall whether C++ makes it into a footgun or not.
Both languages let you use explicit `this` but don’t mandate it. The “static closure” approach is great. I don’t like having to explicitly pass `this` as a parameter to every method call as in the OP (or worse, the confusing Python approach of forcing `self` to be explicitly written in every non-static method signature but having it be implicitly passed during method calls).
What I don’t like is being able to reference instance members without `this`, e.g.
void foo() {
int x = bar + 1; // should be illegal: it can be hard to distinguish if `bar` is a local variable versus an instance member
int y = this->bar + 1; // disambiguation is good
}> int x = bar + 1; // should be illegal: it can be hard to distinguish if `bar` is a local variable versus an instance member
If it was this->bar it could be a member, it could also be a static variable. A bar on its own could be local or it could be in any of the enclosing scopes or namespaces. Forcing "this" to be explicit doesn't make the code any clearer on its own.
The guy was referring to the explicit case where bar is a member variable. The cases where it is in the local scope under scoping rules or the global scope are not really an issue, since you can check the function definition to find if it is local. In the case that it is not in the function definition, then it is in the global scope in C. If implicit this were not done in C++, that would also be the case in C++, provided you do the sane thing and use the std namespace for everything. Just thinking about the headaches namespaces could cause when looking for such definitions with cscope gives me yet another reason to stay away from C++ whenever possible.
Supporting an explicit this is required to be able to access the member variable when a local variable hides it under scoping rules. As another person replied, C++ does indeed have an implicit this.
this in C++ is just a regular pointer, it has no special footguns, just the typical ones you have with pointers in general
that's not really true - unlike a regular pointer, `this` is not allowed to be null, thus removing `if(this == nullptr)` is always a valid optimization to do.
It absolutely is allowed to be null:
#include <iostream>
struct Foo {
void bar() {
std::cout << this << std::endl;
}
};
int main() {
Foo *p = nullptr;
p->bar();
}
This is undefined behavior in my understanding, it just happens to work until it doesn't.
I wouldn't be surprised if any null check against this would be erased by the optimizer for example as the parent comment mentioned. Sanitizers might check for null this too.
Just to cite what the others have told you: https://godbolt.org/z/bWfaYrqoY
/app/example.cpp:10:6: runtime error: member call on null pointer of type 'Foo'
SUMMARY: UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer: undefined-behavior /app/example.cpp:10:6
/app/example.cpp:3:8: runtime error: member call on null pointer of type 'Foo *'
SUMMARY: UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer: undefined-behavior /app/example.cpp:3:8 Foo *p = nullptr;
p->bar();
Only in so much that this being null is UB, but in the real world it very much can be null and programs will sometimes crash deep inside methods called on nullptr.
I think the author is talking about this:
object->ops->start(object)
What guarantee do you have that ->ops is a vtable? It could contain function pointers that don’t take an implicit this argument like struct file_operations in Linux does. It could also contain variables that are non-pointers. Neither is allowed in a vtable, but both are fine to do in C.
As it isn't the compiler that creates the vtable, you can also have the equivalent of this as the last parameter or where you want it to be.
> It could also contain variables that are non-pointers.
The convention of it being a pure vtable is that it just doesn't.
> Neither is allowed in a vtable
Who is the vtable membership authority? :-)
You can take the API for a linked list and implement a balanced binary search tree behind it, but continuing to call it a linked list after doing that is wrong. Similarly, you can do pointer indirections the same way a vtable would do them, but if the things you get are not the equivalent of member function pointers, it is not a vtable.
Nothing a little macro magic couldn't fix..
#define CALL(object, function, ...) (object->ops->function(object, __VA_ARGS__))You can also just replicate the vtable of sorts in C that keeps track of things when new objects are created.
You can just use C++ instead of reinventing a worse version of C++98!
It would be an improvement on C++ since you would avoid the horrendous error messages from ridiculously long types, slow compile times, exception handling nightmares, bloat from RTTI and constant worry that operators might not mean what you expect. That is before even mentioning entirely new classes of problems like the diamond problem. Less is more.
That said, similar macro magic is used in C generic data structures and it works very well.
Yes I know. From the caller that might seem to be redundant, my argument was about the callee's side. Also it is not truely redundant, as you can write:
object1->op->start(object2)
superclass->op->start(object)I think both of these invocations are invalid. Using object1's vtable methods on object2, obviously, but in the latter case: the vtable method should just point at the superclass impl, if not overridden. And if overridden and the child impl needs to call the superclass, it can just do so without dispatching through some vtable.
When you think of vtables as unique or owned by an object, then these example seem weird to you. When you think of them as orthogonal to your types/objects, these examples can be useful.
In the first example, object1 and object2 can very much be of the same type or compatible types/subtypes/supertypes. Having vtables per object as opposed to per class to me indicates, that it IS intended to modify the behaviour of an object by changing it's vtable. Using the behaviour of another object of the same type to treat the second object, seams valid to me.
In the second case, it's not about the child implementation dispatching to the superclass, it's about some external code wanting to treat it as an object of the supertype. It's what in other languages needs an upcast. And the supertype might also have dynamic behaviour, otherwise you of course wouldn't use a vtable.
I think it is wrong/weird for objects of the same type to have different vtables, yes. I would call those different types.
Upcasting is fine, but generally speaking the expected behavior of invoking a superclass method on an object that is actually a subclass is that the subclass method implementation is used (in C++, this would be a virtual/override type method, as opposed to a static method). Invoking a superclass-specific method impl on a subclass object is kind of weird.
In most languages, this is not possible, because they abstract over the implementation of classes. In C it is so you can be more creative. You can for example use it instead of a flag for behaviour. Why branch on a variable and then call separate methods, when you can simply assign the wanted implementation directly. If you want to know, which implementation/mode is used, comparing function pointers and scalar variables amounts to the same. It is also an easy way to get a unique number. When all implementations of that can operate on the same type, they are interchangeable.
In C you can also change the "class" of an instance as needed, without special syntax. Maybe you need to already call a method of the new/old class, before/after actually changing the class type.
> is that the subclass method implementation is used
The entire point of invoking the superclass method is, because the subclass has a different implementation and you want to use the superclass implementation.
"Orthogonal" vtables are essentially traits/typeclasses.
What I really like about C is that it supports these sophisticated concepts without having explicit support for them. It just naturally emerges from the core concepts. This is what makes it feel like it just doesn't restrict the programmer much.
Maybe it's a bit due to its evolution. It started with a language that should have all features every possible, that was to complicated to be implemented at the time. Then it was dumbed down to a really simple language. And then it evolved along side a project adding the features, that are truly useful.
You are wrong about those invocations being invalid. Such patterns happen in filesystem code fairly often. The best example off the top of my head is:
error = old_dir->i_op->rename(rd->new_mnt_idmap, old_dir, old_dentry, new_dir, new_dentry, flags);
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/namei.c#L51...
That is a close match for the first example, with additional arguments.
It is helpful to remember that this is not object oriented programming and not try to shoehorn this into the paradigm of object oriented programming. This is data abstraction, which has similarities (and inspired OOP), but is subtly different. Data abstraction does not automatically imply any sort of inheritance. Thus you cannot treat things as necessarily having a subclass and superclass. If you must think of it in OOP terms, imagine that your superclass is an abstract class, with no implemented members, except you can instantiate a child class that is also abstract, and you will never do any inheritance on the so called child class.
Now, it is possible to implement things in such a way where they actually do have something that resembles a subclass and a superclass. This is often done in filesystem inode structures. The filesystem will have its own specialized inode structure where the generic VFS inode structure is the first member and thus you can cast safely from the generic inode structure to the specialized one. There is no need to cast in the other direction since you can access all of the generic inode structure’s members. This trick is useful when the VFS calls us via inode operations. We know that the inode pointer is really a pointer to our specialized inode structure, so we can safely cast to it to access the specialized fields. This is essentially `superclass->op->start(object)`, which was the second example.
Data abstraction is a really powerful technique and honestly, object oriented programming rarely does anything that makes me want it over data abstraction. The only thing that I have seen object oriented programming do better in practice than data abstraction is marketing. The second example is similar to C++’s curiously recurring template pattern, which adds boilerplate and fighting with the compiler with absurdly long error messages due to absurdly verbose types to achieve a result that often at best is the same thing. On top of those headaches, all of the language complexity makes the compile times slow. Only marketing could convince someone that the C++ OOP way is better.
I don't agree that your example pattern matches to the example I'm complaining about. vfs_rename() is using old_dir's vtable on old_dir. The vtable matches the object.
It is not a vtable. It is a structure of function pointers called struct inode_operations. It is reused for all inodes in that filesystem. If you get it from one callback, you can safely use it on another struct inode on the same filesystem without a problem because of that, because nobody uses this like a vtable to implement an inheritance hierarchy. There are even functions in struct inode_operations that don’t even require the inode structure to be passed, such as ->readlink, which is most unlike a vtable since static member functions are never in vtables:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/vfs.html
As I said previously, it is helpful to remember that this is not object oriented programming and not try to shoehorn this into the paradigm of object oriented programming. Calling this a vtable is wrong.
Again, this just isn't responsive to my comments, which discuss the article. The article's author is clearly talking about OOP. You've invented some alternative article and are arguing about that instead; I'm not interested.
You were not discussing the article in your previous reply. That said, I have repeated explained why both you and the author article are wrong to describe that structure of function pointers as a vtable by giving examples of it containing things that are not allowed in vtables (if say a C++ compiler did this to its vtables, it could cause the wrong function to be called when trying to call a static member function). You ignore that.
The term "vtable" is not exclusive to C++. Trait function dictionaries in Rust are called vtables and behave as described here, there's not necessarily any 'this' or 'self' object.
I don't quite agree, especially because the implicit this not only saves you from explicitly typing it, but also because by having actual methods you don't need to add the struct suffix to every function.
mystruct_dosmth(s);
mystruct_dosmthelse(s);
s->dosmth();
s->dosmthelse();My problem with implicit this is more, that you can access member variables, without it being explicit, i.e. about the callee, not about the caller.
For the function naming, nothing stops you from doing the same in C:
static dosmth (struct * s);
s->dosmth = dosmth;
This is not the same, you introduced dynamic function resolution (i.e.a function pointer tied to a specific instance), we are talking about static function resolution (purely based on the declared type).
True, if you don't trust the compiler to optimize that, then you must live with the C naming.
> Also explicit this eliminates the problem, that you don't know if the variable is an instance variable or a global/from somewhere else.
People typically use some kind of naming convention for their member variables, e.g. mFoo, m_Foo, m_foo, foo_, etc., so that's not an issue. I find `foo_` much more concise than `this->foo`. Also note that you can use explicity this in C++ if you really want to.
In code I write, I can know what variables mean. The feature loses its point, when it's not mandatory. Also being explicit allows you to be more expressive with variable name and ordering.
You can also get clever with macros.
...and C++ added explicit this parameters (deducing this) in C++23.
The implicit this sounds to me like magic. Magic!
Ask how do I do this, well see it's magic. It just happens.
Something went wrong? That's also magic.
After 40 years I hate magic.
“this” is a reserved keyword in C++, so you do not need to worry about it being a global variable.
That said, I like having a this pointer explicitly passed as it is in C with ADTs. The functions that do not need a this pointer never accidentally have it passed from the developer forgetting to mark the function static or not wanting to rewrite all of the function accesses to use the :: operator.
It’s not about ‘this’ being a global, it’s if you see ‘i++’ in code it’s not obvious if ‘i’ is a member or not without having to check context.
If you see "i++" in code and you don't have any context about what "i" is, then what difference does it make if "i" is a member variable, global variable, parameter, etc etc...
If all you see in code is a very tiny 3 character expression, you won't be able to make much of a judgement about it to begin with.
Not allowing a variable to implicitly refer to a member variable makes it much easier to find. If it is not declared in the function and there is no implicit dereferencing of a this pointer, the variable is global. If the variable name is commonly used and it is a member variable, it is a nightmare to hunt for the correct declaration in the codebase with cscope.
Good point. I had misunderstood the previous comment as suggesting that this be passed to the member function as an explicit argument, rather than requiring dereferences of this be explicit. The latter makes far more sense and I agree it makes reasoning about things much easier.
> The article describes how the Linux kernel, despite being written in C, embraces object-oriented principles by using function pointers in structures to achieve polymorphism.
This technique predates object oriented programming. It is called an abstract data type or data abstraction. A key difference between data abstraction and object oriented programming is that you can leave functions unimplemented in your abstract data type while OOP requires that the functions always be implemented.
The sanest way to have optional functions in object oriented programming that occurs to me would be to have an additional class for each optional function and inherit each one you implement alongside your base class via multiple inheritance. Then you would need to check at runtime whether the object is an instance of the additional class before using an optional function. With an abstract data type, you would just be do a simple NULL check to see if the function pointer is present before using it.
In Smalltalk and Objective-C, you just check at runtime whether an object instance responds to a message. This is the original OOP way.
It's sad that OOP was corrupted by the excessively class-centric C++ and Java design patterns.
> In Smalltalk and Objective-C, you just check at runtime whether an object instance responds to a message. This is the original OOP way.
This introduces performance issues larger than the typical ones associated with vtable lookups. Not all domains can afford this today and even fewer in the 80s/90s when these languages were first designed.
> It's sad that OOP was corrupted by the excessively class-centric C++ and Java design patterns.
Both Smalltalk and Objective-C are class based and messages are single-receiver dispatched. So it’s not classes that you’re objecting to. It’s compile-time resolved (eg: vtable) method dispatch vs a more dynamic dispatch with messages.
Ruby, Python, and Javascript all allow for last-resort attribute/message dispatching in various ways: Ruby via `method_missing`, Python by supplying `__getattr__`, and Javascript via Proxy objects.
> This introduces performance issues larger than the typical ones associated with vtable lookups.
Don't know about other programming languages but with Objective-C due to IMP caching the performance is close to C++ vtable
Name Iterations Total time (sec) Time per (ns)
C++ virtual method call 1000000000 1.5 1.5
IMP-cached message send 1000000000 1.6 1.6
When you fear about the branch miss, then you can also just call the method and catch the SIGSEGV. I think if you allow for the possibility of there being no implementation, then you can't really not have some decision there. This would also apply for say a C++ virtual method.
Actually I would say that it is sad that developers learn a specific way how a technology is done in language XYZ and then use it as template everywhere else, what happened to the curiosity of learning?
The curiosity of learning is infeasible given that there are >15,000 programming languages. You might say to only learn the major/influential languages, but I have found my curiosity to wane with every additional language that I learn. So far, I have either used or dabbled in C, C++, FORTRAN, SML/NJ, PHP, Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, POSIX Shell, Assembly and SQL stored procedures. That is not to mention different dialects/versions of those, and the fact that assembly itself is a catch all category in which I have dabbled in multiple languages too. I am also not including languages for which I spent a minuscule amount of time (say a few hours), such as D (as in DTrace), Objective-C, Perl, COBOL and LISP. Then there is the misadventure into C# I took before I actually understood programming where I got stuck and dropped it. I am also not sure if I should mention AWK, as I only use it to select the Nth field in a bunch of lines of text when doing shell scripting and nothing else. Thus, I have used it many times, yet know almost none of its syntax.
Every few years, someone tells me I should learn another language, and in recent years, there just is no desire in my mind to want to learn yet another language that is merely another way of doing something that I already can do elsewhere and the only way I will is if I am forced (that is how I used Go).
That said, I do see what you are saying. C++ for example has an “support every paradigm” philosophy, so whenever someone who has learned C++ encounters a language using a paradigm that C++ assimilated, there is a huge temptation to try to view it through the lens of C++. I also can see the other side too: “C++ took me forever to learn. Why go through that again when I can use C++ as a shortcut to understand something else?”. C++ is essentially the Borg of programming languages.
How do you got proficient in so many languages? I think it takes some years, before you start to think in a language.
I did not know they say the same thing about programming languages.
Based on his comment, I did not think that he is proficient in them, but that he has used them, which is fair enough, so have I, sans all the ones tied to either Apple (Swift) or Microsoft (C#).
I have some projects in Haskell just for curiosity's sake, and because what I wanted seemed like it would be nice in Haskell, and it indeed looks quite elegant to me, for this one particular project. Haskell is not a language I would use generally. OCaml is.
Java is excessively class centric. C++ often is, but it need not be and developers are movingiaway.
smalltalk is not original OO - c++ took oo from simula which was always a different system.
Wait, so in obj-c, could you also write some kijdnof doesnotunderstand method to achieve some dynamic method dispatch?
Yes, that is how microservices were implemented in the days of NeXTSTEP. with PDO.
It's how many things are implemented, like UI message routing, IPC, undo, test mocks.
So why did Swift become a thing? Or does Swift has this too?
Because Objective-C being based on C, means it would never be safe while remaining compatible with C.
Also dynamic runtime dispatch Smalltalk style can never be as fast as the VMT based dispatch, or compile time dispatch via generics, even with all the optimizations in place, that objc_msgSend() has had during its lifetime.
Still, Metal is implemented in Objective-C, so there is that.
Swift isn't messaging-based, it's protocol-based. (Except it's also messaging-based if you use @objc.)
Because Swift adds many other features.
Because Objective-C does not have foo.bar() style method calls and that's what everybody else uses and wants.
Sure, but that is a a horrible coding pattern. Even good smalltalk code doesn't rely on this. It's dogshit and lazy
I largely agree, and use these patterns in C, but you’re neglecting the usual approach of having a default or stub implementation in the base for classic OOP. There’s also the option of using interfaces in more modern OOP or concept-style languages where you can cast to an interface type to only require the subset of the API you actually need to call. Go is a good example of this, in fact doing the lookup at runtime from effectively a table of function pointers like this.
My point is that this pattern is not object oriented programming. As for a default behavior with it, you usually would do that by either always adding the default pointer when creating the structure or calling the default whenever the pointer is NULL.
In the Linux VFS for example, there are optimized functions for reading and writing, but if those are not implemented, a fallback to unoptimized functions is done at the call sites. Both sets are function pointers and you only need to implement one if I recall correctly.
To be fair, OOP is not 100% absolutely perfectly defined. Strustrup swears C++ is OOP, Alan Key, at least at some point laughed at C++, and people using CLOS have yet another definition
> My point is that this pattern is not object oriented programming.
Isn't this exactly how most (every?) OOP language implements it? You would say a C++ virtual method isn't OOP?
Member function pointers and member functions in C++ are two different things. Member function pointers are not OOP. They are data abstraction.
The entire point of OOP is to make contracts with the compiler that forcibly tie certain things together that are not tied together with data abstraction. Member functions are subject to inheritance and polymorphism. Member function pointers are not. Changing the type of your class will never magically change the contents of a member function pointer, but it will change the constants of a non-virtual member function. A member function will have a this pointer to refer to the class. A member function pointer does not unless you explicitly add one (named something other than this in C++).
Yeah, but the compiler implements these by adding vtables, propagating vtables values across inheritance hierarchies, adding another parameter.
You claim when the compiler does this, it's OOP, but when I do it, it's not?
Ìf you do it, it can still be OOP, its just not in an OO language. People have trouble separating using a paradigm and using a language focused on the paradigm, for some reason.
The entire point of OOP in every OOP language that I have ever used has been to have the language try to constrain what you can do by pushing restrictions on syntactic sugar involving objects, inheritance and encapsulation, so I would say yes. The marketing claims that people will be more productive at programming by using these.
Yes, you need to have that to have an OOP language. OOP is object-oriented _Programming_, it's about how you program, not what features the language has.
In hindsight, I had your remark confused with another remark insisting that struct inode_operations is a vtable, despite it having what would be static member functions in C++, which are never in vtables, and there being no inheritance hierarchy. If you are disciplined enough to do what you said, then I could see that as being OOP, but the context here is of something that is not OOP and only happens to overlap with it. The article mentions file_operations, but ignores that it has what would be a static member function in C++ in the form of ->check_flags(), which is never in a vtable.
I'm also thinking that these kind of vtables in the linux kernel are what would be implemented by the compiler in C++. But because its self-written, you can be much more creative and do other things, that weren't possible if this would be created by a compiler.
Of course you could implement the same in C++ and then it can't be the same as the vtable introduced by the compiler, so you would just end up with to vtables, you own and the one introduced by the compiler.
> My point is that this pattern is not object oriented programming.
I think the "is/is not" question is not so clear. If you think of "is" as a whether there's a homomorphism, then it makes sense to say that it is OOP, but it can qualify as being something else too, ie. it's not an exclusionary relationaship.
Object oriented programming implies certain contracts that the compiler enforces that are not enforced with data abstraction. Given that object oriented programming and data abstraction two live side by side in C++, we can spot the differences between member functions that have contracts enforced, and members function pointers that do not. Member functions have an implicit this pointer, and in a derived class, can call the base class version via a shorthand notation to the compiler (BaseClass::func() or super()), unless that base class version is a pure virtual function. Member function pointers have no implicit this pointer unless one is explicitly passed. They have no ability to access a base class variant via some shorthand notation to the compiler because the compiler has no contract saying that OOP is being done and there is a base class version of this function. Finally, classes with unimplemented member functions may not be instantiated as objects, while classes with unimplemented member functions pointers may.
If you think of the differences as being OOP implies contracts with the compiler and data abstraction does not (beyond a simple structure saying where the members are in memory), it becomes easier to see the two as different things.
So you can opt out or in to syntactic sugar, that makes C++ an interesting and useful language, but how you implement OOP, doesn't really affect if it is OOP.
By this logic, C is an objective oriented language. It is widely held to not be. That is why there were two separate approaches to extend it to make it object oriented, C++ and Objective-C.
You can implement OOP in C as you can in any language, the article is an example of this. C is not an OOP language in any way, it doesn't have any syntactic features for it and use the term "object" for something different.
The article mentions file_operations, but ignores that it has what would be a static member function in C++ in the form of ->check_flags(), which is never in a vtable. The article author is describing overlap between object oriented programming and something else, called data abstraction, which is what is really being done inside Linux, and calling it OOP.
You can implement OOP in C if you do vtables for inheritance hierarchies manually, among other things, but that is different than what Linux does.
> Object oriented programming implies certain contracts that the compiler enforces
Sorry, but where did you got this definition from? I've always thought OOP as a way of organizing your data and your code, sometimes supported by language-specific constructs, but not necessarily.
Can you organize your data into lists, trees, and hashmaps even if your language does not have those as native types? So you can think in a OO way even if the language has no notion of objects, methods, etc.
> Sorry, but where did you got this definition from?
It is from experience with object oriented languages (mainly C++ and Java). Technically, you can do everything manually, but that involves shoehorning things into the OO paradigm that do not naturally fit, like the article author did when he claimed struct file_operations was a vtable when it has ->check_flags(), which would be equivalent to a static member function in C++. That is never in a vtable.
If Al Viro were trying to restrict himself to object oriented programming, he would need to remove function pointers to what are effectively the equivalent of static member functions in C++ to turn it into a proper vtable, and handle accesses to that function through the “class”, rather than the “object”.
Of course, since he is not doing object oriented programming, placing pointers to what would be virtual member functions and static member functions into the same structure is fine. There will never be a use case where you want to inherit from a filesystem implementation’s struct file_operations, so there is no need for the decoupling that object oriented programming forces.
> I've always thought OOP as a way of organizing your data and your code, sometimes supported by language-specific constructs, but not necessarily.
It certainly can be, but it is not the only way.
> Can you organize your data into lists, trees, and hashmaps even if your language does not have those as native types?
This is an odd question. First, exactly what is a native type? If you mean primitive types, then yes. Even C++ does that. If you mean standard library compound types, again, yes. The C++ STL started as a third party library at SGI before becoming part of the C++ standard. If you mean types that you can define, then probably not without a bunch of pain, as then we are going back to the dark days of manually remembering offsets as people had to do in assembly language, although it is technically possible to do in both C and C++.
What you are asking seems to be exactly what data abstraction is, which involves making an interface that separates use and implementation, allowing different data structures to be used to organize data using the same interface. As per Wikipedia:
> For example, one could define an abstract data type called lookup table which uniquely associates keys with values, and in which values may be retrieved by specifying their corresponding keys. Such a lookup table may be implemented in various ways: as a hash table, a binary search tree, or even a simple linear list of (key:value) pairs. As far as client code is concerned, the abstract properties of the type are the same in each case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)...
Getting back to doing data structures without object oriented programming, this is often done in C using a structure definition and the CPP (C PreProcessor) via intrusive data structures. Those break encapsulation, but are great for performance since they can coalesce memory allocations and reduce pointer indirections for objects indexed by multiple structures. They also are extremely beneficial for debugging, since you can see all data structures indexing the object. Here are some of the more common examples:
https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/sys/queue.h
https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/sys/tree.h
sys/queue.h is actually part of the POSIX standard, while sys/tree.h never achieved standardization. You will find a number of libraries that implement trees like libuutil on Solaris/Illumos, glib on GNU, sys/tree.h on BSD, and others. The implementations are portable to other platforms, so you can pick the one you want and use it.
As for “hash maps” or hash tables, those tend to be more purpose built in practice to fit the data from what I have seen. However, generic implementations exist:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6118539/why-are-there-no...
That said, anyone using hash tables at scale should pay very close attention to how their hash function distributes keys to ensure it is as close to uniformly random as possible, or you are going to have a bad time. Most other applications would be fine using binary search trees. It probably is not a good idea to use hash tables with user controlled keys from a security perspective, since then a guy named Bob can pick keys that cause collisions to slow everything down in a DoS attack. An upgrade from binary search trees that does not risk issues from hash function collisions would be B-trees.
By the way, B-trees are containers and cannot function as intrusive data structures, so you give up some convenience when debugging if you use B-Trees.
> handle accesses to that function through the “class”, rather than the “object”
You don't need classes for OOP. C++ not putting methods that logically operate on an object, but don't need a pointer to it, into the automatically created vtable, is an optimization and an implementation detail. I don't know why you think that putting this function into a vtable precludes OOP.
Wait, how does inheritance work when the method is not in the vtable?
> This technique predates object oriented programming.
I would rather say that OOP is a formalization of predating patterns and paradigma.
OOP cannot be a formalization of what predated it because the predating patterns support things that OOP explicitly disallows, like instantiation with unimplemented functions. That is extremely useful when you want to implement an optional function, or mutually exclusive functions such that you pick which is optional. This should be the case in the Linux VFS with ->read() and ->read_iter(). Also, ASTs were formalized after OOP, despite existing prior to it in Lisp.
For full disclosure, I have never verified that leaving ->read() unimplemented when ->read_iter() is implemented is safe, but I have seen enough examples of code that I strongly suspect it is and if it is not, it is probably a bug.
OOP does not disallow instantiation with unimplemented functions, it's just an artefact of implementation in some languages.
OOP only disallows inheritance with unimplemented functions when it's a contract violation.
So that is to say, if the base class has a certain function which must be implemented and must provide certain behaviors, then the derived class must implement that function and provide all those behaviors.
The POSIX functions like read and write do not have a contract which says that all implementations of them must successfully transfer data. Being unimplemented (e.g returning -1 with errno EOPNOTSUPP or whatever) is allowed in the contract.
OOP just wants a derived thing to obey the contract of the abtraction it is inheriting, so if you want certain liberties, you have to push them into the contract.
I would call returning something being implemented as a stub rather than being unimplemented. When something is unimplemented and you try to call it, you crash due to a NULL/invalid pointer dereference, not get an error back. Of course, as far as getting things done is concerned, the two might as well be the same, but as far as how the language works, the two are different.
Having a stub or having a NULL pointer are two ways to leave something unimplemented. Which you use is an implementation detail. You can also use some other sigil instead of NULL.
That's just it; in the POSIX world, the library functions like read and write are just a facade. They call something in a kernel, and that something examines the file descriptor and dispatches a lower level function. It's possible that that is literally unimplemented: as in a null function pointer in some structure. The facade converts that to a -1 return with an approprriate `errno` like EOPNOTSUPP (operation not supported).
Crashing is optional, depending on error model of the language. C has pitiful error model, thus you'll usually end up jumping to 0... but I recall at least one C environment where that gave you an error back instead of crash.
As far as OOP is concerned, lack of implementation is not an issue in instantiating something - an object will just not understand the message, possibly catastrophically.
I was referring to POSIX functions when talking about stubs versus unimplemented functions. Messaging in a programming language is a different animal; one that I have yet to fully understand. Objective C for example resolves messages to function calls, so they look like function calls to me. I would love to know how they differ, but I have never dug into it.
Semantically, most OOP models[1] (even C++) involve "messages" that are "sent" to an object. "Methods" are "how do I handle this kind of message".
This usually resolves to a function call because it's the easiest and most sensible way to do it.
Objective-C is more explicit about it due to Smalltalk heritage. Some languages model objects as functions (closures) that one calls with the "message" (an old trick in various FP languages is to implement a trivial object system with closures for local state).
[1] Arguably CLOS with Generic Functions can be seen as outlier, because the operation becomes centerpiece, not the object.
That sounds like a case of the Liskov substitution principle.
Yes it is, but the point is that without the contract being defined, we can't apply the principle; the details of the interface contract determine what it means to be substitutable.
The LSP is never absolute in a practical system. Because why would you have, say, in a casee of inheritance, a Y which is an new kind of X, if all it did was substitute for X, and behave exactly the same way? Just use X and don't create Y; why create a substitute that is perfectly identical.
If there is a reason to introduce a new type Y which can be used where X is currently used, then it means they are not substitutable. The new situations need a Y and not X, and some situations don't need a Y and stay with X.
In a graphics program, an ellipse and rectangle are substitutable in that they have a draw() method and others, so that they plug into the framework.
But they are not substitutable in the user's design; where the user needs an ellipse, a rectangle won't do, and vice versa.
In that case the contract only cares about the mechanics of the program: making multiple shapes available in a uniform way, with a program organization that makes it easy to code a new shape.
The substitution principle serves the program organization, and not much more.
So with the above discussion in place, we can make an analogy: an ellipse object in a vector graphics program can easily be regarded as a version of a rectangle with unimplemented corners.
The user not onnly doesn't mind that the corners are not implemented, but doesn't want them because they wouldn't make sense.
In the same way, it doesn't make sense to have lseek() on a pipe, or accept() on TTY descriptor or write() on a file which is read only to the caller, etc.
> like instantiation with unimplemented functions
I think this is more of an effect of C distinguishing between allocating memory (aka object creation) and initialization, which other languages disallow for other reasons, not because there are not OOPy enough.
Unlike OOLs, C does not enforce contracts around structures (objects). You are free to do literally anything you want to them.
You can do exactly what was done in C with most OOP languages like Java & C# because you have lambdas now, and lambdas are just function pointers. You can literally assign them to instance variables (or static variables).
(sorry it took more than a decade for Java to catch up and Sun Microsystems originally sued Microsoft for trying to add lambdas to java way back when, and even wrote a white paper insisting that anonymous inner classes are a perfectly good substitute - stop laughing)
Inheritance is not needed when a composite pattern can be used.
class DefaultTask { }
class SpecialTask { }
class UsedItem {
UsedItem() { _task = new SpecialTask() }
void DoIt() { _task.DoIt() }Is python a OOP language? Self / this / object pointer has to be passed similar to using C style object-oriented / data abstraction.
The interesting thing is, that in the OOP implementation inheritance IS composition of vtables and data. It's really only syntactic sugar, that is sometimes not unambiguous.
This is not quite correct. OOP implementation inheritance involves a kind of "open recursion" (that is, calls to base-class methods can end up dispatching to implementations from a derived class) that is not replicated with pure composition. All method calls, including method calls that originate from code in some class anywhere in the hierarchy, ultimately dispatch through the vtable of whatever object they're called on.
But that's exactly the same you would need to implement manually when you use composition. When constructing, you also need to construct the contained objects, when doing something that should affect a contained object, you need to dispatch it.
When a method is never overridden, it doesn't need to be in the vtable.
That's not what people usually mean by "composition" though. The whole point of "use composition over inheritance" is to avoid that behavior.
I don't see how you can use composition without eventually calling methods of the contained objects. Every method of the outer object either uses an inner object or it doesn't. Yes, using the inner object doesn't always means just delegating to a single call. You maybe would implement the outer by calling an inner objects method multiple times or different methods, but nothing stops you of doing the same thing with a super class. When you don't call to an inner object, it's the same as you adding another method to the subclass, without it being present in the parent class.
I think composition over inheritance is only about being explicit. That's it.
Python doesn't require self to be passed. You need it in method definitions, but not calls.
But you can do it. Actually you can call instance methods of other classes and change the class of an instance in Python like in C, but this dynamism is probably what makes it slow. Also doing that will make the program quite complicated, more so than in C, since Python also abstracts about this.
The concept of abstract data type is a real idea in the days of compiler design. You might as well say "compiler design predates object oriented programming". The technique described in the lead is used to implement object-oriented programming structures, just as it says. So are lots of compiler design features under the hood.
source- I wrote a windowing framework for MacOS using this pattern and others, in C with MetroWerks at the time.
Compiler design does predate object oriented programming. The first compiler was made by John Backus et al at IBM in April 1957.
As for abstract data types, they originated in Lisp, which also predates object oriented programming.
Actually, no.
"AN ALGORITHMIC THEORY OF LANGUAGE", 1962
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0296998.pdf
In this paper they are known as plexes, eventually ML and CLU will show similar approaches as well.
Only much latter would Lisps evolve from plain lists and cons cells.
You caused me to do some digging. That publication is dated November 1962. The Lisp 1.5 manual’s preface is dated August 17, 1962, which is even older. It describes lambdas and property lists, which seem like they can be used to implement ADTs, although I do not have a Lisp 1.5 interpreter since those are obsolete, so I cannot verify that. Computer history articles claim that Simula, the first object oriented language, was born in May 1962, but was not actually operational until January 1965:
https://history-computer.com/software/simula-guide/
Thus, while I had thought Lisp had ADT concepts before the first OOL existed, now I am not sure. My remark that they originated in Lisp had been said with the intention that I was talking about the first language to have it. The idea that the concept had been described outside of an actual language is tangential to what I had intended to say, which is news to me. Thanks for the link.
Plexes are first mentioned in 1960
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/366199.366256
and the paper even starts with a critique of the efficiency of Lisp's approach for representing data with cons pairs (citing McCarthy's paper from the same year).
You might also want to watch Casey's great talk on the history of OOP
A talk[0] about Tmux is where I learned about this pattern in C.
I wrote about this concept[1] for my own understanding as well -- just tracing the an instance of the pattern through the tmux code.
[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tmux/tmux/1536b7e206e51488... [1] https://blog.drnll.com/tmux-obj-oriented-commands
I've done this on a few smaller projects when I was in college. It's fun bringing something similar to OOP into C; however you can get into trouble really quickly if you are not careful.
I usually put an inline wrapper around vtable functions so that `thing->vtable->foo(thing, ...)` becomes `foo(thing, ...)`.
Note that this is using interfaces (i.e. vtables, records of function pointers), not full object-orientation. Other OO features, like classes and inheritance, have much more baggage, and are often not worth the associated pain.
vtables contain function pointers to functions that take “this” pointers. The author mentions struct file_operations as an example of a vtable. struct file_operations contains a pointer to a function that does not take “this” pointer. It is not even a vtable.
I would still call it a vtable. Who assures you that every function of a class needs a pointer to the object instance? When you don't need it, you can just leave it of when you roll your own.
What do you think inheritance is, if not composition of vtables? What do you think classes are, if not a composition of a vtable and scoped variables?
Those "scoped variables" are the difference. Mutable state adds a great deal of complexity.
And the style presented in the article uses vtables with "scoped variables". How do you conclude it's "not full object-orientation"?
Field inheritance is surprisingly natural in C, where a struct can be cast to it's first member.
Note that you only need to cast for an upcast. To access the first member, you wouldn't need to cast.
It would be nice though, if syntax like the following would be supported:
struct A
{
int a;
};
struct B
{
int b;
struct A a;
};
void foo (struct A * a)
{
struct B * b;
&b->a = pa;
}
struct B b;
foo (&b.a);In what scenario would this be useful? If foo() takes a struct A, it should be more generic and have no knowledge about the more specialized struct B.
In exact that same scenario, that you would cast to a subclass in another language, it's about language support for what for example the kernel does with container_of.
Of course casting to a subclass isn't guaranteed to succeed always, but for example when you have actually declared it as the subclass elsewhere it's fine without checking for isinstance.
Yeah you're right, I meant the other way around. Also another loosely related idea is the container_of macro in Linux kernel.
Yeah, my idea is literally native type-safe support of container_of for assignment in the compiler.
I always wonder, why not anything similar made it into a new (some) C version? Clearly, there is a significant demand for - lots of people reimplementing the same (similar) set of patterns.
Whenever you invent syntactic sugar you need to make some usage blessed and some usage impossible/needing to fallback to the old way without syntactic sugar. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45040662. Also some point of C is, that it doesn't hide that dynamic complexity. You always see when there is dynamic dispatch. There are tons of language, which introduce some formalism for these concepts, honestly most modern imperative languages seem to be. The unique selling point of C is, that you see the complexity. That influences you to only use it if you really want it. Also the syntax isn't really that complicated.
Probably into the High C Compiler.
Another cool thing about this approach is you can have the arguments to your object init be a pointer to a structure of args. Then down the line you can add features to your object without having to change all the calls to init your object throughout the code base.
Yup. I've often wonder why the aversion to C++ since they are obviously using objects. Is it that they don't want to also enable all the C++ language junk like templates or OO junk like inheritance?
Here's one example. For us, it's more a tradeoff rather than an aversion. There's pros (manual memory management in C) and cons (manual memory management in C) for each. We do math operations (dense and sparse matrix math for setting up and solving massive systems of differential equations) on massive graphs with up to billions of nodes and edges. We use C in parts of the engine because we need to manage memory at a very fine level to meet performance demands on our tool. Other parts of the tool use C++ because they decided the tradeoff benefited in the other direction, re memory access / management / ease of use. As a result we need really robust qa around memory leaks etc. and tbh we rely on one generational talent of an engineer to keep things from falling apart; but we get that speed. As a side note, we implement objects in C a little more complex than the op, so that the object really does end up as a black box to the user (other engineers), with all the beauty of data agnosticism.
What parts of it can't just be compiled as C++ code? (unless it has to do with the subtle difference in implicit lifetime object rules)
IMO it's much easier to write resleaks/double-frees with refcounted objects in C than it is in C++
VLAs, named structure assignment, sane treatment of the void type, having different "lifetimes" for object (the C understanding of object) existence and initialization, having different namespaces for composed types and variables, a local error handling convention, leading to better error messages, robuster behaviour and a feeling for completeness, a lot of examples of the article and here in the thread, and most importantly no magic.
C makes it obvious were you use that dynamism and where you don't. Syntactic sugar doesn't really make that much of a difference and also restricts more creative uses.
The C syntax is not really that complicated. Dynamic dispatch and virtual methods was already in the article. Here is inheritance:
struct Subclass {
struct Baseclass base;
};
As for stuff like templates: C doesn't thinks everything needs to be in the compiler. For example shadowing and hiding symbols can be done by the linker, since this is the component that handles symbol resolution across different units anyway. When you want templates, either you actually want a cheap way of runtime dynamism, then do that, or you want source code generation. Why does the compiler need to do that? For the basics there is a separate tool in the language: the Preprocessor, if you want more, you are free to choose your tool. If you want a macro language, there is e.g. M4. If you want another generator just use it. If you feel no tool really cuts it, why don't you write your code generator in C?
If this is the pattern you prefer, why not choose a language that caters to it? Choosing C just seems like you're TRYING to shoot yourself. I don't care how good you are at coding, this is just a bad decision.