Why would you use the ternary operator without assigning a value for the “true” condition (x = x ?: 1)

Question

In the Android open-source qemu code I ran across this line of code:

machine->max_cpus = machine->max_cpus ?: 1; /* Default to UP */

Answer 1

There's another useful case for this -- the elimination of intermediate variables when calling a function or method that might return nil, that we wish to avoid calling twice. For example (Objective-C), suppose we want to unpack a file into an array if it exists, otherwise return an empty array.

- (NSArray*)hydrateBacklogFromFile:(NSString *path)
{
    NSArray *backlog = @[];
    NSData *backlogData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path];
    if (backlogData)
    {
        backlog = [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:backlogData] ?: backlog;
    }
    return backlog;
}

The alternatives are less concise.

- (NSArray*)hydrateBacklogFromFile:(NSString *path)
{
    NSArray *backlog = @[];
    NSData *backlogData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path];
    if (backlogData)
    {
        NSArray *tempArray = [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:backlogData];
        if (tempArray != nil)
        {
            backlog = tempArray;
        }
    }
    return backlog;
}

Or uglier with multiple returns etc.

- (NSArray*)hydrateBacklogFromFile:(NSString *path)
{
    NSData *backlogData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:path];
    if (backlogData)
    {
        NSArray *tempArray = [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:backlogData];
        if (tempArray != nil)
        {
            return tempArray;
        }
    }
    return @[];
}

So it's useful syntactic sugar that I find fairly readable. The downsides are

• Implicit conversion of a pointer to a bool. This is a long-standing C convention, but most modern languages disallow it, complicating any porting efforts.

• As others have said it's also a non-standard extension, so it should be avoided if portability is a consideration at all.