Question

I’m working on testing whether or not my container wrappers are implementing URefs correctly. The only obvious way that I can think of is to try to figure out a way of detecting if an object has been moved.

Is there a good way of testing to make sure that an object was not copied? Or is there another way to test for what I want? I would prefer a solution that doesn’t require modifying the classes I’m testing. Because there’s a couple dozen of them.

Could you please provide some more info on what you have? Like what is your container, how you use it, can you modify it or not, etc. Maybe you can test this without modification of your container, but rather by using special container element type – which tracks copies and moves.

Several different containers and some standalone templated functions. Mostly, it’s wrappers around STL library types like deque, list, map, set, etc.

Answer 1

Is there a good way of testing to make sure that an object was not copied?

You may try following check:

live demo

#include <boost/container/vector.hpp>
#include <iostream>
#include <ostream>
#include <vector>
#include <string>

using namespace boost;
using namespace std;

struct Test
{
    bool copied;
    Test()
        : copied(false)
    {
    }
    Test(const Test&)
        : copied(true)
    {
    }
};

template<typename Container>
void check_move_constructor()
{
    Container from(1);
    Container to(boost::move(from));
    cout << "\tmove constructor is" << (to[0].copied ? " not" : "") << " working" << endl;
}

template<typename Container>
void check_move_assignment()
{
    Container from(1);
    Container to;
    to=boost::move(from);
    cout << "\tmove assignment is" << (to[0].copied ? " not" : "") << " working" << endl;
}

template<typename Container>
void check_move(const string &name)
{
    cout << name << " :" << endl;
    check_move_constructor< Container >();
    check_move_assignment< Container >();
    cout << string(16,'_') << endl;
}

int main()
{
    cout << boolalpha;
    check_move< container::vector<Test> >("boost::container::vector");
    check_move< vector<Test> >("std::vector");
    return 0;
}

MSVC2008 outputs:

boost::container::vector :
        move constructor is working
        move assignment is working
________________
std::vector :
        move constructor is not working
        move assignment is not working
________________

Note, that in this code I used explicit move from lvalues, so Copy-elision can’t work here.

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P.S. another way to do this is to check generated assembler code. For instance /FA compiler option on MSVC or -S on GCC.

You can mark place of interest with special function call:

__declspec(noinline) void asm_marker(int line) { volatile int i=line; };
#define ASM_MARKER asm_marker(__LINE__)

And place that marker in code:

    ASM_MARKER;
    func_of_interest();
    ASM_MARKER;

Asm code may look like:

    mov     ecx, 235                                ; 000000ebH
    call    ?asm_marker@@YAXH@Z                     ; asm_marker
    mov     edi, r12d
    lea     rcx, QWORD PTR [rdi+rdi*4]
    mov     rax, QWORD PTR vec$[rsp]
    lea     r9, QWORD PTR [rax+rcx*8]
    mov     rbx, QWORD PTR vec$[rsp+32]
    mov     ecx, 237                                ; 000000edH
    call    ?asm_marker@@YAXH@Z                     ; asm_marker