Working around the C++ limitation on non-const references to temporaries

Question

I've got a C++ data-structure that is a required "scratchpad" for other computations. It's not long-lived, and it's not frequently used so not performance critical. However, it includes a random number generator amongst other updatable tracking fields, and while the actual value of the generator isn't important, it is important that the value is updated rather than copied and reused. This means that in general, objects of this class are passed by reference.

If an instance is only needed once, the most natural approach is to construct them whereever needed (perhaps using a factory method or a constructor), and then passing the scratchpad to the consuming method. Consumers' method signatures use pass by reference since they don't know this is the only use, but factory methods and constructors return by value - and you can't pass unnamed temporaries by reference.

Is there a way to avoid clogging the code with nasty temporary variables? I'd like to avoid things like the following:

scratchpad_t<typeX<typeY,potentially::messy>, typename T> useless_temp = factory(rng_parm);
xyz.initialize_computation(useless_temp);

I could make the scratchpad intrinsically mutable and just label all parameters const &, but that doesn't strike me as best-practice since it's misleading, and I can't do this for classes I don't fully control. Passing by rvalue reference would require adding overloads to all consumers of scratchpad, which kind of defeats the purpose - having clear and concise code.

Given the fact that performance is not critical (but code size and readability are), what's the best-practice approach to passing in such a scratchpad? Using C++0x features is OK if required but preferably C++03-only features should suffice.

Edit: To be clear, using a temporary is doable, it's just unfortunate clutter in code I'd like to avoid. If you never give the temporary a name, it's clearly only used once, and the fewer lines of code to read, the better. Also, in constructors' initializers, it's impossible to declare temporaries.

Answer 1

While it is not okay to pass rvalues to functions accepting non-const references, it is okay to call member functions on rvalues, but the member function does not know how it was called. If you return a reference to the current object, you can convert rvalues to lvalues:

class scratchpad_t
{
    // ...

public:

    scratchpad_t& self()
    {
        return *this;
    }
};

void foo(scratchpad_t& r)
{
}

int main()
{
    foo(scratchpad_t().self());
}

Note how the call to self() yields an lvalue expression even though scratchpad_t is an rvalue.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but Rvalue reference parameters don't accept lvalue references so using them would require adding overloads to all consumers of scratchpad, which is also unfortunate.

Well, you could use templates...

template <typename Scratch> void foo(Scratch&& scratchpad)
{
    // ...
}

If you call foo with an rvalue parameter, Scratch will be deduced to scratchpad_t, and thus Scratch&& will be scratchpad_t&&.

And if you call foo with an lvalue parameter, Scratch will be deduced to scratchpad_t&, and because of reference collapsing rules, Scratch&& will also be scratchpad_t&.

Note that the formal parameter scratchpad is a name and thus an lvalue, no matter if its type is an lvalue reference or an rvalue reference. If you want to pass scratchpad on to other functions, you don't need the template trick for those functions anymore, just use an lvalue reference parameter.

By the way, you do realize that the temporary scratchpad involved in xyz.initialize_computation(scratchpad_t(1, 2, 3)); will be destroyed as soon as initialize_computation is done, right? Storing the reference inside the xyz object for later user would be an extremely bad idea.

self() doesn't need to be a member method, it can be a templated function

Yes, that is also possible, although I would rename it to make the intention clearer:

template <typename T>
T& as_lvalue(T&& x)
{
    return x;
}

Answer 2

Is the problem just that this:

scratchpad_t<typeX<typeY,potentially::messy>, typename T> useless_temp = factory(rng_parm);

is ugly? If so, then why not change it to this?:

auto useless_temp = factory(rng_parm);

Answer 3

Personally, I would rather see const_cast than mutable. When I see mutable, I'm assuming someone's doing logical const-ness, and don't think much of it. const_cast however raises red flags, as code like this should.

One option would be to use something like shared_ptr (auto_ptr would work too depending on what factory is doing) and pass it by value, which avoids the copy cost and maintains only a single instance, yet can be passed in from your factory method.

Answer 4

I marked FredOverflow's response as the answer for his suggestion to use a method to simply return a non-const reference; this works in C++03. That solution requires a member method per scratchpad-like type, but in C++0x we can also write that method more generally for any type:

template <typename T> T & temp(T && temporary_value) {return temporary_value;}

This function simply forwards normal lvalue references, and converts rvalue references into lvalue references. Of course, doing this returns a modifiable value whose result is ignored - which happens to be exactly what I want, but may seem odd in some contexts.

Answer 5

If you allocate the object in the heap you might be able to convert the code to something like:

std::auto_ptr<scratch_t> create_scratch();

foo( *create_scratch() );

The factory creates and returns an auto_ptr instead of an object in the stack. The returned auto_ptr temporary will take ownership of the object, but you are allowed to call non-const methods on a temporary and you can dereference the pointer to get a real reference. At the next sequence point the smart pointer will be destroyed and the memory freed. If you need to pass the same scratch_t to different functions in a row you can just capture the smart pointer:

std::auto_ptr<scratch_t> s( create_scratch() );
foo( *s );
bar( *s );

This can be replaced with std::unique_ptr in the upcoming standard.