Why const?

With judicious use of const you can catch many bugs and improve code documentation and maintenance. For me the classic example is reading from and writing to files. Look at these two interfaces in stylized C++:

bool Read(File & file, char * buffer, unsigned & size) bool Write(File & file, char const * buffer, unsigned const & size);

The first one tells me that the buffer may be modified by the function. In fact, the Read function will most likely write characters into it. It is also allowed to modify the parameter size, putting the number of characters read into it. The incorrect call

Read("abc", 3);

will not compile.

The second declaration promises that the buffer will not be modified and neither will size. So the following (correct) call will compile:

Write("abc", 3);

What’s more, when compiling the implementation of Write , the compiler will ensure that the arguments are not modified (unless the programmer subverts the type system using const_cast ).

What does const guarantee? Not much!

This optimistic picture is marred by a few gotchas. You’d think that if you call a function taking a const reference, the object you are passing won’t change (assume there’s no use of const_cast or mutable members). Think again!

In a multithreaded program, another thread might change the object concurrently. You may avoid this problem by preventing concurrent access using critical sections. But even in a single threaded program there is no guarantee the const object won’t change. That’s because there might be a non-const alias to the argument you’re passing. This alias might be accessible to the function either through a global variable, or through another argument. The classic example is copying elements between overlapping ranges. The source for the copy is passed as const, the target as non-const, but if they point at overlapping regions, the source may end up modified. There is a stronger version of constness that might guarantee immutability. The qualifier is usually called immutable and it’s available in the D programming language and in some dialects of Java. I’ll come back to it later. On top of those gotchas, even in a single-threaded C++ program with no aliasing of arguments, a const function argument might get mutated. That’s because constness is shallow–it doesn’t protect indirect data members (pointers or references). See next section.

Transitivity or “deep” const

Consider a list that is defined recursively:

class List { public: List * GetNext() const { return _next; } void SetNext(List * next) { _next = next; } private: List * _next; }; void clip(List const * list) { List * next = list.GetNext(); if (next) next.SetNext(0); }

Function clip takes a const list and blatantly modifies it. That’s because the indirect member, _next , of a const List is not const . C++ constness is not transitive! This fact is reflected in GetNext being a const method and returning a non-const pointer to _next . So even if this is const inside GetNext , indirect parts of this are open to modification.

I always found the non-transitive definition of const counter-intuitive, and made sure that in my code constness was always transitive. For instance, I would implement GetNext to return a const pointer:

List const * GetNext() const { return _next; }

and maybe provide another non-const method that returns a non-const pointer. Notice the need for code duplication in this approach.

The depths of immutability

I have an even larger problem with non-transitive immutability (as opposed to constness). I expect a const method of an immutable object to leave the object unchanged. In particular I expect such method to behave like a pure function (not to be confused with pure virtual function). A pure function returns the same value every time it’s called with the same arguments. I expect the length of an immutable string to never change. Every call to size should return the same value. I would even expect the compiler to eliminate redundant calls to size is such a case. Here’s a hypothetical example:

immutable string("Hello!"); doSomething(string.data(), string.size()); doSomethingElse(string.data(), string.size());

A smart compiler could cache the results of data and size from the first set of calls and reuse them when calling doSomethingElse . However, if immutable is not transitive, such an optimization is incorrect. Just imagine a bizarre implementation of string that stores the length indirectly:

class string { public: string(char const * src) { _length = new unsigned; *_length = strlen(src); ... } unsigned size() const { ++*_length; return *_length; } private: unsigned * _length; };

The D-language model

Taking all the above arguments into account, we decided to implement both const and immutable as transitive type modifiers in the D programming language. This enabled a lot of interesting compiler optimizations.

Making const and immutable transitive is essential for D’s support for functional-style programming. It’s important that const methods of an immutable object be pure functions. It’s also important to let the compiler optimize functional-style code, which otherwise tends to be less efficient than its imperative-style equivalent.

Functional programming is one of the safest paradigms for concurrency. Pure functions and immutable objects don’t require locking.

The price of transitivity

Having said that, transitivity of const imposes some constraints on the programming style. It enforces the view that anything reachable from an object is part of the object. When you are given a const linked list, all links in it must necessarily be const. That makes logical sense–the links are part of the list.

The picture gets muddier when the object contains references to some external services. Just by calling them “external,” I’m admitting that they are not part of the object.

Can an object that contains a Windows handle be const? Is it enough that it doesn’t modify the handle itself? Or shouldn’t it also refrain from modifying the window or the file behind the handle? Handles are often implemented as opaque pointers so, strictly speaking, constness should propagate through them. But how do I know which APIs don’t mutate the state of Windows and which do? This is an extreme example, but there are many in-between cases.

In an editor you might have an undo stack that stores editing commands. When you call the undo method of the command object, you may pass it a reference to the document object on which it is to operate. In that case undo may be declared as const . But if you store a reference to the document within each command, the undo method can no longer be const –it modifies the document. The classic Command Pattern uses the latter approach.

It hasn’t been decided yet if and how D will support an escape mechanism from const transitivity (and constness in general). Following C++, D could use the mutable type qualifier for that purpose. This would also solve the problem of memoizing and caching inside a const object.

In the next installment, I’ll describe more complexities of immutability and discuss a dialect of Java that supports immutability constraints.

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