[cairo] cairomm: Path destruction

[Owen Taylor]

On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 19:54 -0600, Rick L Vinyard Jr wrote:
> I noticed that Context::copy_path() wraps the call to cairo_copy_path()
> and allocates an instance of Path on the heap, and ~Path cleans it up by
> calling cairo_path_destroy().
> 
> It seems like Context::copy_path() should return a RefPtr<Path>
> instead...

Speaking on a theoretical level, and not making recommendations for
cairomm directly:

Since cairo_path_t is an immutable type, it doesn't really make sense
to me to pas it around as a pointer at all in C++; the caller can't
care about identity, so you might as well return a bare Path which
is *internally* a smart pointer, but doesn't reveal that to the 
programmer.

This probably would mean using a two-part object ... having an internal
object that is reference counted and memory manages the cairo object
and a public object that is a smart pointer to that.

(You could probably just get away with copying the cairo_path_t in
a copy constructor and only have a one-part object... compilers are
smart these days... but it's very clunky to copy a cairo_path_t so
it wouldn't be noticeably easier.)

Regards,
					Owen