Thoughts about getters and setters in C++

This article deals with getters and setters in C++. I am sorry, it is not about coroutine, but part 2 of thread pools will come in the following weeks.

TL;DR: Getters and setters are bad for structure like objects.

Introduction

In this article, I will only give my opinion about them, I don’t want to offend anyone, I am just going to explain why, or why not, use getters and setters. I would be glad to have any debates in the comments part.

Just to be clear about what I am talking about when I talk about getter, I talk about a function that just returns something, and when I talk about setter, I talk about a function that just modifies one internal value, not doing any verification or other computations.

Getter performances

Let’s say we have a simple structure with their usual getter and setters:

Let’s compare this version with the one without getters and setters.

It is incredibly shorter and less error_prone. We can not make the error to return the last name instead of the first name.

Both codes are fully functional. We have a class Person with the first name, the last name, and an age. However, let’s say we want a function that returns the presentation of a person.

Show the performance differences between computation using getters by value and public access.

The version without getters performs this task 30% quicker than the version with getters. But why? It is because of the return by value of the getters functions. Returning by value makes a copy that results in poorer performance. Let’s compare the performance between person.getFirstName(); and person.firstName.

Show the performance differences between getters by value and public access.

As you can see, accessing directly the first name instead of a getter is equivalent to a noop.

Getter by const reference

However, it is possible to not return by value but return by reference instead. Going that way, we will have the same performance as without getters. The new code will look like that

Since we get the same performance as before, are we done? To answer this question, you can try to execute this code.

You may see some weird characters wrote in the console. But why? What happened when you do make().getLastName()?

  1. You create a Person
  2. You get a reference to the last name
  3. You delete Person

You have a dangling reference! It can lead to a crash (in the best case) or something worst than what can be found in a horror movie.

To deal with such a thing, we must introduce reference qualified functions.

Here is the new solution that works everywhere. You need 2 getters. One for lvalue and one for rvalue (both xvalue and prvalue).

Setter issues

There is not a lot to say in this section. If you want to achieve the best performances, you must write a setter that takes a lvalue and one that takes a rvalue. However, it is generally fine to just have a setter that takes a value that will be moved. Nevertheless, you have to pay the price of an extra move. However, that way, you cannot just make a little enhancement. You must replace the whole variable. If you just wanted to replace one A by a D in a name, it will not be possible by using setters. However, using direct access makes it possible.

What about immutable variables?

Ones will tell you to just make the member attribute as const. However, I am not ok with this solution. Indeed, making it const will prevent the move semantic and will lead to unnecessary copy.

I have no magic solution to propose you right now. Nevertheless, we can write a wrapper which we can named immutable<T>. This wrapper must be able to be :

  1. Constructible
  2. Since it is immutable, it must not be assignable
  3. It can be copy constructible or move constructible
  4. It must be convertible to const T& when being a lvalue
  5. It must be convertible to T when being a rvalue
  6. It must be used like other wrapper through operator* or operator->.
  7. It must be easy to get the address of the underlying object.

Here is a little implementation

So, for an immutable Person, you can just write:

Conclusion

I would not say that getters and setters are bad. However, when you do not need to do anything else in your getter and your setter, achieving the best performance, safety and flexibility lead to writing:

  • 3 getters (or even 4): const lvalue, rvalue, const rvalue, and if you want, non-const lvalue (even if sounds really weird since it is easier to just use direct access)
  • 1 setter (or 2 if you want to have the maximum performance)

It is a lot of boilerplate for almost anything.

Some people will tell you that getters and setters enforce encapsulation, but they don’t. Encapsulation is not just making attributes private. It is about hiding things from users, and for structure-like objects, you rarely want to hide anything.

My advice is: when you have a structure like objects, just don’t use getter and setters and go with public / direct access. To be simple, if your setter does not enforce any invariant, you don’t need a private attribute.

PS: For people who use libraries using shallow copy, the performance impact is less important. However, you still need to write 2 functions instead of 0. Don’t forget, the less code you write, the less bugged it will be, easier to maintain, and easier to read.

And you ? Do you use getters and setters? And why?

12 thoughts on “Thoughts about getters and setters in C++”

  1. Nice walk around C++ features, and great analysis: OOP theorists like Allen Hollub already explained that getters and setters are against good OOP practices, because they expose the object members.

  2. std::string getLastName() && { return std::move(m_lastName); }
    std::string getFirstName() && { return std::move(m_firstName); }

    here you are moving the member variable . so, after the string has been moved we should not access it afterward or else it i will result to undefined behavior, if used as below :-
    PersonGettersSetters obj;
    string szLastName = obj.getLastName();
    cout<<"Last Name = " <<szLastName; // works fine

    szLastName = obj.getLastName(); // Bug : last names is already been moved in previous call.

    1. Hello, it is normally not true.
      In your example, obj.getLastName(), the called function will be the const lvalue qualified one, not the rvalue qualified one. So there is no bug in your example.

  3. Pingback: hi
    1. Thanks for this kind words

      The theme is totally free, I don’t have the skills to modify one by myself

  4. I suppose one argument for using getters/setters functions up front is that you can add extra functionality later without changing the API. E.g. data validation in the setter, or calculating a value or invoking a cache in the getter. If you use public data members, then you’re stuck with them, unless you also have access to all calling code, which often isn’t true.

    That said, I look at all this code to just get/set a person’s name safely and I wonder how we got here. This is atrocious. Our children will not thank us for this abomination we’ve created.

  5. I’m using simple rule: If I need setter, I make the variable public. That means, I’m using getters only in situations where I need other objects to acces the varialbe, but don’t want the other objects to modify the value. Modification is done by the class only and other objects are just reading the value.

    1. So, are you providing two getters ? One for lvalue and one for rvalue? Would you be interested in using an immutable wrapper as I proposed?

      1. immutable seems like a solution, on the other hand it makes things more complicated. I would say using a simple getter will be never a performance bottle neck for 99,9% applications out there. If there is something special, you usally will be aware of that as this will be different from the things you doing 99% of time anyway; and well, you will write special code to handle the situation. But not needed to do that beforehand. My other rule I like to follow is YAGNI…

        1. Seems to be a nice rule 😉
          I actually agree with everything you just said, I just wanted to share ideas :).
          It seems we agree with the structure like object 🙂

          1. Indeed, I like the article a lot!
            The next is sentences are not related to this article. What I see and I think Bjarne agree as well (at least I’ve got the feeling after looking at his lectures on YT) are over complicated codebases, trying to be super clever and using various language features. Like there are situations we have to use them, but many times are making our lives more complicated and we write dangerous code really easily. The good example is Photoshop. You have a lot of features there, beginners usualy using the army of plugins and effects, but the pros are good to go with some brushes and some basic effects coming with photoshop. Good example is also NASA code base for some of their projects, where things are really super-super simple on purpose…

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