Issue or Design Decision?

[rlogiacco]

Issue or Design Decision?

[rlogiacco]

Would you expect to have a shallow or a deep copy?

[Erlkoenig90]

A shallow copy would hardly be possible reasonably, since the memory is allocated inside the CircularBuffer class. Therefore we need to do a deep copy, which also is convention with C++ classes & containers. We have to re-set the head/tail pointers properly, however, since they would point to the original elements otherwise. Alternatively we can use indices instead of pointers. Similar to #16, we should also make sure that the copy constructors / assignment operators of elements are only called if they exist. I could add that to the PR...

[rlogiacco]

Considering this library aims at microcontrollers and memory is a big limitation I would discourage or even disable the whole pass-by-value rather than supporting it via a deep copy. I can already imagine a user invoking a function and ending up with a hardware rest due to memory corruption...

I could understand a shallow copy, but that would have other implications in terms of unexpected side effects.

[rlogiacco]

I'm willing to solve this by disabling the copy constructor and the assignment operator based on the principle a deep copy is too memory expensive:

private: 
    CircularBuffer(const CircularBuffer&); // no implementation 
    CircularBuffer& operator=(const CircularBuffer&); // no implementation 

[Erlkoenig90]

A more modern way would be:

    CircularBuffer(const CircularBuffer&) = delete;
    CircularBuffer(CircularBuffer&&) = delete;
    CircularBuffer& operator=(const CircularBuffer&) = delete;
    CircularBuffer& operator=(CircularBuffer&&) = delete;

The visibility shoud probably be public: as that probably results in better compiler errors. I added the rvalue variants for completeness.

[rlogiacco]

A more modern way would be:

This makes me feel damn old 👴