bug #505: add more examples of bad and correct usages of auto and eval().

This commit is contained in:
Gael Guennebaud 2015-09-02 13:04:30 +02:00
parent aba8c9ee17
commit be5e2ecc21
2 changed files with 18 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -405,6 +405,8 @@ template<typename Derived> class DenseBase
*
* Notice that in the case of a plain matrix or vector (not an expression) this function just returns
* a const reference, in order to avoid a useless copy.
*
* \warning Be carefull with eval() and the auto C++ keyword, as detailed in this \link TopicPitfalls_auto_keyword page \endlink.
*/
EIGEN_DEVICE_FUNC
EIGEN_STRONG_INLINE EvalReturnType eval() const

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@ -18,5 +18,21 @@ for(...) { ... w = C * v; ...}
In this example, the type of C is not a MatrixXd but an abstract expression representing a matrix product and storing references to A and B. Therefore, the product of A*B will be carried out multiple times, once per iteration of the for loop. Moreover, if the coefficients of A or B change during the iteration, then C will evaluate to different values.
Here is another example leading to a segfault:
\code
auto C = ((A+B).eval()).transpose();
// do something with C
\endcode
The problem is that eval() returns a temporary object (in this case a MatrixXd) which is then referenced by the Transpose<> expression. However, this temporary is deleted right after the first line, and there the C expression reference a dead object. The same issue might occur when sub expressions are automatically evaluated by Eigen as in the following example:
\code
VectorXd u, v;
auto C = u + (A*v).normalized();
// do something with C
\endcode
where the normalized() method has to evaluate the expensive product A*v to avoid evaluating it twice. On the other hand, the following example is perfectly fine:
\code
auto C = (u + (A*v).normalized()).eval();
\endcode
In this case, C will be a regular VectorXd object.
*/
}