I am storing the ownership of some objects inside an unordered_set
, using unique_ptr
s.
But I don't know a good way to erase one of them from the set, when the time comes.
Code looks something like this:
typedef unique_ptr<MyType> MyPtr;
unordered_set<MyPtr> owner;
MyPtr p = make_unique<MyType>("foo")
MyType *pRaw = p.get();
owner.insert(std::move(p));
// Later ...
// I want to do something like this (cannot be written as-is, of course):
// owner.erase(pRaw);
Is there a way to do this?
I can, of course, iterate the entire set with begin()
and end()
, but the whole point of putting them in the set is to make these lookups efficient.
Some things I have thought of already:
shared_ptr
. This is the wrong abstraction for my case. Ownership is unique.unique_ptr
provides.unordered_set::begin(key)
. As far as I know, there is no way for me to create a key that will match the unique_ptr
I want to delete. But I'm happy to be proven wrong (:(In truth, I solved this using eastl::unordered_set
, with its find_as
function for custom keys)
This is a tough case. erase
has an overload that takes a const key_type&
parameter, so we can try to create a "stale" unique_ptr
to get the hash value of the element to be erased:
template <typename T>
auto erase(std::unordered_set<std::unique_ptr<T>>& set, T* ptr)
{
std::unique_ptr<T> stale_ptr{ptr};
auto ret = set.erase(stale_ptr);
stale_ptr.release();
return ret;
}
This version, however, is not exception safe in general, because release
will not be called if set.erase
throws an exception. This is not a problem in this case, since std::equal_to<std::unique_ptr<T>>::operator()
never throws exception. In the general case, we can abuse unique_ptr
(!) to enforce exception safety by ensuring that release
is called regardless of whether the function is exited normally or exceptionally:
template <typename T>
auto erase(std::unordered_set<std::unique_ptr<T>>& set, T* ptr)
{
std::unique_ptr<T> stale_ptr{ptr};
auto release = [](std::unique_ptr<T>* p) { p->release(); };
std::unique_ptr<std::unique_ptr<T>, decltype(release)> release_helper{&stale_ptr, release};
return set.erase(stale_ptr);
}