Shared References

In our previous discussion, we fleshed out the design requirements and took action into servicing them. In the same way, this article aims to flesh out the design requirement for shared reference.

Shared references make use of a reference counting mechanism that allows resources to be shared in different parts of the program. In some cases, this technique replaces the need for garbage collection as reference counting automatically cleans up the resources at the time it hits 0.

The implementation of shared references has a performance cost which led implementers of garbage collection (GC) algorithms to weigh their choices in implementing automatic resource management. Dynamic languages such as Java, C#, and Dart implement more sophisticated GC’s to minimize the cost of developing applications. Some languages relied on reference counting techniques like C++ and Rust for system-level programming. And some languages like Python make use of both in combination. We can observe that the decision of choosing a resource management system depends on the intended use of the language. For instance, C++ supported smart pointers for automatic reference management while allowing manual resource management through raw pointers because the language is aimed at servicing problems that exist from the level of the silicon to the highest levels of abstraction – that is why C++ provide resource-safe automation and manual resource management.

Before we implement our shared reference class, let first us discuss the advantages and disadvantages of implementing reference counting (RC).

Advantages

RC guarantees that resources are cleaned up as soon as their last reference is destroyed.
RC is deterministic through RAII.
RC is relatively simple to implement over more sophisticated GC algorithms.

Disadvantages

RC may leak resources in case of reference cycles.
RC has space overhead for reference counting.
RC is difficult to deal with in a multithreaded environment since it requires atomicity.

Note that the disadvantages vary in the sophistication of RC implementation. In our last discussion, we showed the problem of reference cycles and resolved this by std::weak_ptr<T>. We will review this problem and work through solving the problem of reference cycles by implementing a weak_reference class.

In the meantime, let us focus on implementing our simple model of shared reference.

Design Goals

Let us flesh out our design requirements. Our shared_reference class must satisfy the following:

Must accept any types
Automatic Resource Management
Reference counting
Pointer-like interface

Implementation

Now, we translate the design requirements into code. We will build up from it one by one.

Requirement: Must Accept any Type

This is trivial, but let us include it here. To put this into code, we simply make use of template parameters as follows:

template <typename T> class shared_reference;

Simple right? Let’s keep going!

Requirement: Automatic Resource Management and Reference Counting

The idea is to make use of RAII – a programming idiom that gives us guarantees with resource-safe management. We simply need to fill out the resource acquisition upon construction and resource clean-up upon destruction. RAII is achieved through constructor-destructor pairs which are triggered to keep track of the object’s lifetime.

template<typename T> class shared_reference{
T* m_ptr{nullptr};
public:
  shared_reference() = default;

   ~shared_reference(){
      if(m_ptr != nullptr){
          m_ptr->~T();
        m_ptr = nullptr;
      }
    }
};

That seems, reasonable. We initialized m_ptr to null and we successfully cleaned up our resources at the time it went out of scope. But that is what we did with unique_reference, right? How is shared reference any different?

The answer lies with the reference counting mechanism. To extend the lifetime of our objects, we have to know when it is appropriate to perform our clean-up. As mentioned, we perform our clean-up in the case where our reference count is 0. Now that we get the idea, let us put this in code.

template<typename T> class shared_reference{
  size_t m_counter{1};
  T *m_ptr{nullptr};

public:
  shared_reference() = default;

  ~shared_reference() {
    m_counter -= 1;
    if (m_counter == 0) {
      m_ptr->~T();
      m_ptr = nullptr;
    }
};

The idea is to count how many instances that refer to m_ptr are still active. With RAII, we can delegate this role to our constructor; that is, for each time it creates an instance of shared_reference it has to increment m_counter and for each time it goes out of scope, it has to decrement and check if it is time for clean-up. Let’s write a copy constructor and a special constructor that takes in a T* parameter.

shared_reference() = delete;
explicit shared_reference(T* i_ptr): m_ptr(i_ptr){}
explicit shared_reference(shared_reference<T>& rhs){
  rhs.m_ptr = m_ptr;
  rhs.m_counter = m_counter + 1;
}

The first constructor is designed to accommodate the initialization of our reference which takes away the need for our default constructor so we deleted it. We want to tell the compiler that it is not free to deduce the default constructor in the case where we need our class to initialize the user has to explicitly bind the content of its referent.

Our copy constructor is not technically a copy-constructor because at the time we pass shared_reference<T>& we only want it to share the contents of m_ptr and increment m_counter. What we want is to provide an interface for sharing references. To avoid confusion, I will refer to shared_reference(shared_reference<T>&) as a reference constructor.

But if we want to transfer the ownership to another entity and we don’t want it to have shared access to it anymore? This is the responsibility of our move constructor.

shared_reference(shared_reference<T>&& rhs) noexcept {
  std::swap(m_ptr, rhs.m_ptr);
  rhs.m_counter = 1;
}

Notice that we initialized rhs.m_counter to 1 and not swapped the values of m_counter, this is because we want to re-initialize the counter when it is transferred.

That seems correct. But we ran into deep trouble when we decided to test this. Let us consider the following assertions:

shared_reference<AnyType>ptr_0(new AnyType());
{
shared_reference<AnyType>ptr_1(ptr_0);
  {
    shared_reference<AnyType>ptr_2(ptr_1);
  }
}

For each time we instantiate an object, we reserve a representation of our model and record the states of its instances. But we do not share the states of our instances. So each time we call our reference constructor, we are actually populating unrelated state changes with our instances.

That is a subtle bug, not a feature!

What we actually want is to have a common ground for communication that updates all the instances of shared_reference<T> each time it goes out of scope. So, it seems reasonable to use static members. Let’s add the assignment overloads and debug!

template<typename T> class shared_reference{
  static size_t m_counter;
  T* m_ptr;

  public:
    shared_reference() = delete;
    explicit shared_reference(T* i_ptr): m_ptr(i_ptr){}
    explicit shared_reference(shared_reference<T>& rhs) noexcept
      {rhs.copy(*this); }
    explicit shared_reference(shared_reference<T>&& rhs) noexcept
      {rhs.swap(*this); }

    ~shared_reference(){
      m_counter -= 1;
      if(m_counter == 0){
        m_ptr->~T();
      }
    }

    T &operator=(shared_reference<T>& rhs)noexcept {rhs.copy(*this); }
    T &operator=(shared_reference<T>&& rhs) noexcept {rhs.swap(*this); }

  private:
    void copy(shared_reference<T>& rhs) noexcept{
      m_counter += 1;
      rhs.m_ptr = m_ptr;
    }
    void swap(shared_reference<T>& rhs) noexcept {
      std::swap(m_ptr, rhs.m_ptr);
    }
};

template<typename T>
size_t shared_reference<T>::m_counter = 1;

We did it! We hit two birds with one stone. Let’s work on the pointer-like interface!

Requirement: Pointer-like Interface

We need an interface to communicate with the state of our unique reference. For consistency, it has to resemble the interface of a pointer.

Recall that a pointer can be dereferenced with * and -> operators. And we need & operator to inspect the location of our pointer in memory. These are the basic operators we need to overload for our unique reference. To do this, we write:

  T &operator*(void) { return *(this->m_ptr); }
  T *operator->(void) { return this->m_ptr; }
  T &operator&(shared_reference<T> &other) { return other.m_ptr; }

Let us walk through the three lines.

The first line returns a reference of *(this->m_ptr) which means that the content of m_ptr is accessed that which we can modify and read. The same idea goes with the arrow operator, we return a pointer to m_ptr’s location in memory. The last operator is slightly different in that it returns the address of the pointer and not the referent. Recall that a pointer has its own location in memory separate from the entities it points to.

Let’s go beyond our requirement list and add little features that return the current count of our references and their contents. We call these functions count(), and get(). The implementation is equally trivial.

Putting it all together

template<typename T> class shared_reference{
  static size_t m_counter;
  T* m_ptr;

  public:
    shared_reference() = delete;
    explicit shared_reference(T* i_ptr): m_ptr(i_ptr){}
    explicit shared_reference(shared_reference<T>& rhs) noexcept
      {rhs.copy(*this); }
    explicit shared_reference(shared_reference<T>&& rhs) noexcept
      {rhs.swap(*this); }

    ~shared_reference(){
      m_counter -= 1;
      if(m_counter == 0){
        m_ptr->~T();
      }
    }

    T &operator=(shared_reference<T>& rhs)noexcept {rhs.copy(*this); }
    T &operator=(shared_reference<T>&& rhs) noexcept {rhs.swap(*this); }
    T &operator*(void) { return *(this->m_ptr); }
    T *operator->(void) { return this->m_ptr; }
    T &operator&(shared_reference<T> &other) { return other.m_ptr; }
    T *get(void) { return this->m_ptr; }
    size_t count() const { return m_counter; }

  private:
    void copy(shared_reference<T>& rhs) noexcept{
      m_counter += 1;
      rhs.m_ptr = m_ptr;
    }
    void swap(shared_reference<T>& rhs) noexcept {
      std::swap(m_ptr, rhs.m_ptr);
    }
};

template<typename T>
size_t shared_reference<T>::m_counter = 1;

Test Cases

Time to see if we satisfied our design requirements:

Summary

We fleshed out our design requirements and implemented our version of the shared reference to satisfy what we intend to do with shared references. Upon testing, we found that it sufficiently did what we want it to do: we now have the second piece of our automatic resource management!

Since we implemented a simple shared resource management, think about how you can extend this to support indexing in an array structure.

Have fun hacking!

References

Wikipedia contributors. (2021, June 29). Garbage collection (computer science). https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Garbage_collection_(computer_science).
Oracle (n.d.). Java Garbage Collection Basics. https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/java/gc01/index.html.
Microsoft Docs (2020). Background garbage collection. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/garbage-collection/background-gc.
Mrale.ph (n.d.). Introduction to Dart VM. https://mrale.ph/dartvm/.
Rust (n.d.). Module alloc::rc. https://doc.rust-lang.org/alloc/rc/.
cppreference.com (2021). std::shared_ptr. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/shared_ptr.
Debrie, A. (2021). Python Garbage Collection: What It Is and How it works? https://stackify.com/python-garbage-collection/.
Microsoft Docs (2020). Welcome back to C++ - Modern C++. https://bityl.co/8HD7.
cppreference.com (2021). static members. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/static.