[PATCH] gdb: make inferior::terminal a unique ptr

[Pedro Alves]

On 6/25/20 6:59 PM, Luis Machado wrote:
> On 6/25/20 2:28 PM, Pedro Alves wrote:
>> On 6/25/20 6:18 PM, Christian Biesinger via Gdb-patches wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jun 25, 2020 at 10:55 AM Simon Marchi via Gdb-patches
>>> <gdb-patches@sourceware.org> wrote:
>>>> -    current_inferior ()->terminal = xstrdup (terminal_name);
>>>> +    current_inferior ()->terminal.reset (xstrdup (terminal_name));
>>>
>>> Perhaps it really should be a std::string?
>>
>> I think there's no good reason for that.  It's a string that doesn't
>> ever need to grow/shrink.  And then its use is to pass down to
>> a syscall that accepts C-style null-terminated strings:
> 
> I tend to agree with Christian. I suppose one positive outcome is to make the code less cumbersome. It's not like xstrdup is great to read anyway.
> 
> Are we worried about performance implications of passing std::string's around like this?

It's more like -- why store a fat 32 bytes object in the inferior when
a pointer does just as well.  There's no code that would benefit from
making this a string, like, there's no strlen call that that would avoid.
The code that wants to consume this wants a pointer.  A method-based
interface like I pointed at in that github commit exposes a pointer.
So it would just be implementation detail.

Thanks,
Pedro Alves