CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidc++templatespointersandroid-ndk
Mark Gerolimatos
Mark Gerolimatos

Reputation: 2584

Shared pointers: are there any gotcha differences between Android's "sp<>" template and BOOST's "shared_ptr<>" template?

I am embarking on some Android NATIVE coding (e.g. C++, not Java), and need to use the fairly undocumented sp<> ("Strong Pointer") refcount'd pointer class.

As far as I can tell, the Android sp<> template looks VERY much like the more familiar BOOST shared_ptr<> template. Standard refcount mechanism. They do NOT appear to be part-for-part compatible. For instance, Strong Pointers do NOT appear to be threadsafe. What other gotchas are there between the two?

A wider question would be: why is there no online reference for the NDK? Are they having enough diskspace problems on developer.android.com that they cannot fit it there? Grumble.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 1944

Answers (1)

Digit
Digit

Reputation: 2113

Android's sp<> is undocumented because it is part of the platform, and its implementation might change between platform revisions. You should not use it in NDK code, unless you copy all of the headers and corresponding source files into your own project.

It is intentionally not thread-safe for performance reason: actually doing thread-safe ref-counting requires adding memory barrier instructions which slow down the operation significantly on ARM (not so much on x86 and x86_64 though). Even Chrome uses two different classes to implement ref-counting for this reason (i.e. base::RefCounted and base::RefCountedThreadSafe).

As to other gotchas, I can't really tell, but I guess the implementation of weak pointers is also different from Boost. In all cases, if you don't understand what this code does, don't use it, it's not meant for general consumption.

Upvotes: 6

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