There are definitely advantages to using inside-out / flyweight objects: they're light-weight, relatively simple to implement and give you private, per-package properties (no more worries about inheriting classes messing up your properties, yay!).

Now basing the flyweight "key" on the object's ref-address also makes it much harder to accidentally modify the key, you don't need any seperate algorithm to generate unique keys, and since all objects have a ref-address, you can inherit from any "normal" class with an inside-out subclass and vice-versa (vice-versa provided the top-class propagates DESTROY).

Now, there is only a problem with this approach if you use ithreads. I don't know about you, but I've not used ithreads except as a toy; for me, I'm not sure that the benefits of ithreads are worth the risk :-) It's not like they're completely devoid of bugs and caveats.

Update: I completely glossed over the win32 fork() problems. I didn't even know that a fork() on win32 would modify your ref-address (I use win32 only when I *really* have to). Still, I can imagine situations where you'd want the above code, but I'd use a special-purpose flyweight key if I'd have a choice in the matter.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re^2: Threads and fork and CLONE, oh my! by Joost
in thread Threads and fork and CLONE, oh my! by xdg

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