Trivial types

[zargot]

Is it possible to make the vec types trivially constructable? (std::is_trivial)
If so; are there any plans for this?

[Groovounet]

How would that possible?

[chbaker0]

Not sure about trivially constructible, but they could easily be trivially copyable (if they aren't already). Then you'd be able to use memcpy and memmove on them.

[zargot]

I suppose it would be unreasonable to make them trivially constructible. But I propose trivially copyable as an enhancement.
std::has_trivial_copy_constructor and std::has_trivial_copy_assign both fail with glm::dvec3 on GCC 4.9.1.

[Groovounet]

I think you had std::is_trivially_copy_assignable and std::is_trivially_copyable in mind.

With a short experiment I should make vec4 being trivially copyable.

I am not familiar with this, what's the value of doing it?

[Groovounet]

Erm safe copy with memcpy... I never ever seen any issue with it before...

[zargot]

GCC doesn't have those functions yet, but they should be equal.
I think it's mostly about performance, and beeing able to use it in containers that require the type to be trivially copyable, etc. ("Trivial" types may be optimized more, skipping initialization, afaik.)
Thanks!

[chbaker0]

@Groovounet Having them be trivially copyable would mean that users of the library could, with appropriate padding, use memcpy directly to load an array of structs containing vectors/matrices into a buffer for GL following the std140 or std430 format. Otherwise you'd be invoking undefined behavior.

[Groovounet]

Correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that all GLM types can be is trivially copyable which they all are now so i am closing the bug.

Don't hesitate to open another bug or reopen the bug if you see additional opportunities.

Thanks for reporting,
Christophe