Using the wastebasket class

The wastebasket class provides a garbage collection object. Arbitrary arrays of primitives, objects, and arrays of objects can be attached to it and deleted at a later date.

This is useful for holding on to dependencies of an object until the object no longer needs them. For example, a function might create several related objects, return one of them, and attach the others to a wastebasket. The caller can use the returned object and then empty the wastebasket to clean everything up at once.

The wastebasket class is targeted for use with the MVC classes, but it can be used in non-MVC projects as well.

#include <rudiments/wastebasket.h>
#include <rudiments/charstring.h>
#include <rudiments/stringbuffer.h>
#include <rudiments/stdio.h>

int main(int argc, const char **argv) {

	wastebasket	wb;

	// attach dynamically allocated strings...
	char	*str1=charstring::duplicate("hello");
	char	*str2=charstring::duplicate("goodbye");
	wb.attach(str1);
	wb.attach(str2);

	// the strings are still usable...
	stdoutput.printf("str1: %s\n",str1);
	stdoutput.printf("str2: %s\n",str2);
	stdoutput.write('\n');


	// attach dynamically allocated arrays of primitives...
	int64_t	*nums=new int64_t[3];
	nums[0]=100;
	nums[1]=200;
	nums[2]=300;
	wb.attach(nums);

	stdoutput.printf("nums: %lld, %lld, %lld\n",
			nums[0],nums[1],nums[2]);
	stdoutput.write('\n');


	// attach a dynamically allocated object...
	stringbuffer	*sb=new stringbuffer();
	sb->append("hello from stringbuffer");
	wb.attach(sb);

	stdoutput.printf("sb: %s\n",sb->getString());
	stdoutput.write('\n');


	// empty the wastebasket, deleting all attached values...
	stdoutput.printf("emptying the wastebasket...\n");
	wb.empty();
	stdoutput.printf("done\n");

	// str1, str2, nums, and sb are no longer valid
}