From: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>
To: Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez@igalia.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
In-Reply-To: <20091120200300.55ba8736@hikari>
References: <935ead450911181000w2cddfe95qe9efd5bea9f9209d@mail.gmail.com>
	<20091119164543.25e7afe5@hikari>
	<935ead450911191823s776fda6eyb6f6949ac982bd03@mail.gmail.com>
	<87lji11leu.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org> <20091120200300.55ba8736@hikari>
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:32:34 +0100
Message-ID: <87tywo3efx.fsf@yoom.home.cworth.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Subject: Re: [notmuch] Segfault searching for tags
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On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:03:00 +0100, Adrian Perez de Castro <aperez@igalia.com> wrote:
> Well, of course you are right, it is an overloaded operator, which
> (unfortunately, IMHO) looks like a pointer dereference. That is exactly
> one of the things that I find more confusing about C++: it has features
> like operator overloading which look cool initially, but that in the end
> imply more complexity than needed. I can understand why you decided to
> wrap Xapian with a plain C API :)

I'm glad you agree.

Though I should mention that I earned my summer's salary during an
internship once by solving a performance problem that had dodged the
engineers on the project, (since they overlooked an overloaded array
subscript operator on a std::string class as something that could be
expensive---profiling made it obvious, and a temporary copy to a real
array with a real subscript fixed the bug).

So I can't say that operator overloading never helped me. But I know I
left that internship determined not to use it myself.

> I can confirm that this patch avoids the segfault in my case, too. Thanks
> a lot for the quick fix.

Excellent. I'm glad to hear it worked for you.

I'm sorry that the bug was there, since this was a regression that's
come back once or twice now. The project is overdue for a test suite
already...

-Carl