Question

Suppose I have a class Baz that inherits from classes Foo and Bar, in that order. The constructor for class Bar takes a pointer to a Foo object. What I would like to do is to pass this as the Foo object to the Bar constructor:

Baz () : Foo(), Bar(this) {}

A working example:

#include <iostream>
class Bar;
class Foo {
  public:
  virtual ~Foo() {}
  virtual void parse_bar (Bar&) const = 0;
};  

class Bar {
  private:
  const Foo * parser;
  public:
  Bar (const Foo * parser_in) : parser(parser_in) {}
  virtual ~Bar() {}
  void parse_self () { parser->parse_bar (*this); }
};  

class Baz : public Foo, public Bar {
  public:
  Baz () : Foo(), Bar(this) {}
  virtual void parse_bar (Bar &) const { std::cout << "Hello World\n"; }
};

int main () {
  Baz baz;
  baz.parse_self();
}

This happens to work on my computer, with my compilers (tested with a couple of them). However section 9.3.2 of the 2003 standard makes me a bit uneasy that I might just be getting lucky, that using this this way is undefined behavior. Strictly speaking, the initializer list is outside the body of the constructor. Here’s the relevant text, emphasis mine:

9.3.2 The this pointer
In the body of a nonstatic member function, the keyword this is a non-lvalue expression whose value is the address of the object for which the function is called.

So is my usage legal and well-defined, or is it undefined behavior?

Answer 1

There are two points that have to be noted in this case.

Firstly, in the constructor initializer list this pointer refers to a non-constructed (or not-fully-constructed) object. It is OK to access such pointer, but the object it refers to can only be used in limited ways. See 12.7 in the language specification.

Secondly, in your specific example what you are actually doing is converting this pointer to Foo * type before attempting any access. This is completely safe since by that moment the Foo subobject is fully constructed. (I assume that, whatever access will follow, if any, will be restricted only to the fully constructed Foo subobject).

The only concern is this case is whether it is legal to convert this to Foo * type, i.e. whether the conversion process itself should succeed. The answer is: yes, in case of ordinary (non-virtual) inheritance such conversion is perfectly legal and safe (again, explicitly allowed in 12.7)