[QGIS-Developer] Is it just me, or is sip totally broken?

[Martin Dobias]

Hi Matthias

On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 12:34 PM Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch> wrote:
>
> Are you convinced that the proper solution will be a /ReleaseReference/
> annotation?

I am not convinced, but for now I do not have a better idea :-)

I agree that the virtual destructors could automatically release that
held reference, so /ReleaseReference/ would only be needed in cases
like take() method where the object is not being deleted, but c++
should not hold the reference anymore.

> I would assume that the current information is sufficient for sip /
> sipify to generate proper bindings without a new annotation.
>
>  From what I understand, sip creates an internal subclass that forwards
> virtual methods to their python implementations. I would assume that the
> destructor of this subclass can be used to trigger the garbage
> collection / decreasing the ref counter and the reference counter should
> be increased when the object is sent through a /Transfer/ annotated
> function parameter.

I am not sure if /Transfer/ should automatically increase reference
counter. It would add unnecessary extra memory footprint when not
passing a derived object (if you just want to pass some simple data
objects) - in such case it is not useful to keep python references
around if they will never be used again in Python code. But this is
probably best to discuss with Phil as I am by no means a SIP expert
and there are maybe other issues that we are not aware of.

Cheers
Martin