Should user's base classes be registered with factory?

[mastrick]

We have a number of base classes that inherit from uvm base classes. Our base classes are intended to be inherited from by end user classes; we do not instance these base classes. So far, we have been using `uvm_object_utils, etc. to register our base classes. But we have seen there is quite a compile time overhead to doing that. What do we give up if we do not use `uvm_object_utils for our base classes but do use it for our end user classes? Is it just that we could not include base class fields in the pre-defined methods and if we ever did instance a base class, we could not ever replace it? Or is there another pitfall we may encounter?

Thanks,

Mark

[uwes]

hi mark,

i think there are some things to consider:

1. if the classes are real base classes, then they should be abstract/virtual. (so they are not registered with the factory then)

2. if you dont register the fields via the macros you can still implement the do_(copy,print,...) in order that derived classes handle the fields as if they were normal uvm_field_xxx*

3. if you dont register the fields you also loose auto config thus needing manual extraction of values from the config_db

/uwe

[Roman]

one appending to uwe's good comments

Classes properties should be declared before they are referenced by `uvm_field_* macro