Re: Question about Finalization Control and reference counting

["Alexander Boucke" <alexb@lufmech.rwth-aachen.de>]

Hello!

I managed to do this in a little more complicated way, but it works:


  type object is new ada.finalization.controlled with private;

-- some functions for object


private
  type handled_object is record
     ref_count : natural;
     -- other Data
  end record;

  type handled_object_access is access handled_object;

  type object is new ada.finalization.controlled with
     record
       the_object: handled_object_access;
     end record;

This way adjust and finalize are called for the type object and can access
object.the_objetc.ref_count.

I implemented a package doing vector- and matrix-algebra that way, since I
wanted to minimize the overhead of having temporary objects while evaluating
statements like a:=b+c; and did not want to think about handling pointers
all the time. It even allowed me to write some sort of caching technique to
reuse some vectors.

There is probably an easier way to implement this, if somebody has one...

Regards,

Alexander Boucke