Charm++ parallel programming system

[Robert Steinke <rsteinke AT uwyo.edu>]

Something came up in my code that I think might be generally useful.  I 
want to pup a std::vector of pointers.  The objects that the pointers 
point to have pup routines.  The code in pup_stl.h, in the process of 
pupping the vector, tries to pup each element in the vector.  But the 
elements in the vector aren't the puppable objects.  They are pointers 
to those objects.  I came up with this solution:

// This is a general function to pup a puppable object via a pointer to it.
template <typename T> inline void operator|(PUP::er &p, T* &pointer)
{
  bool notNull = (NULL != pointer);

  p | notNull;

  if (notNull)
    {
      if (p.isUnpacking())
        {
          pointer = new T;
        }

      p | *pointer;
    }
  else
    {
      pointer = NULL;
    }
}

It seems like this could be generally useful for any situation where you 
want to pup a pointer to a puppable object.  Would you consider this as 
an addition to the Charm++ codebase?



BTW, the reason my code has a std::vector of pointers is that I want a 
vector of objects of various subclasses of a single base class. To do 
this I have a vector of pointers to the base class pointing to 
dynamically allocated objects of the various subclasses.

Bob Steinke