dimanche 7 mai 2017

What is the best pattern to return dynamically allocated buffer from a function in C++?

I'm in the process of refactoring some old code. There's a C style function that works like this: (Obviously I've simplified it here)

int LoadData(char** buf1, int* buf1Len, char** buf2, int* buf2Len) {
    *buf1Len = DetermineLength1();
    *buf1 = (char*)malloc(*buf1Len);
    // Fill buf1
    *buf2Len = DetermineLength2();
    *buf2 = (char*)malloc(*buf2Len);
    // Fill buf2
    int result = 0; // Or some other INT depending of result
    return result;
}

Now, I'd like to update this code to somehow return a unique_ptr or equivalent, so the pointer will be automatically managed by the caller, and the caller won't ever forget to free the memory.

I couldn't find a good solution, so currently I've changed the code to the following:

int LoadData(std::unique_ptr<char[]>* ubuf1, int* buf1Len, std::unique_ptr<char[]>* ubuf2, int* buf2Len) {
    // same code as above, and finally:
    ubuf1->reset(buf1);
    ubuf2->reset(buf2);
    return result;
}

This doesn't look good, so I'm looking to see if there's a better solution. Since I'm returning two buffers, using the unique_ptr as the return value is not an option.

Is there any better way for this?

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