Getting rid or working around global mutable state in ncurses TUI program

[quartz bloom]

As in the title, I'm making a small bank app simulator in ncurses, and I've been trying to make some wrappers for ncurses stuff so it's less manual but I've hit a big challenge with init_pair and COLOR_PAIR stuff, I have a wrapper for WINDOW objects so I don't have to allocate and deallocate them manually but what if I want to pass the color pair of given window at the wrapper's construction? since every color pair is identified by a global number defined in init_pair I can't just init the pair in the constructor because if I use a number that's already used it will retroactively change colors of different already created windows and I just can't seem to figure out a nice, sleek way of handling it

[shrewd stone]

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[wind lance]

Can you not just make a global counter to ensure you never use the same value twice?

I read that you get 32k values, so you'll probably not run out unless you generate colors in a loop.

[quartz bloom]

I could just make a counter like that and increment it every time I construct an object of the wrapper type but that honestly feels very iffy, I know that interactions between C and C++ sometimes just have to have rough edges like that but I just wanted to ask if a cleaner solution is possible

[wind lance]

What would you consider cleaner?

You could keep an object around for the color that remembers its number and add it to a free list upon destruction, ready to be reused. I don't think that is an improvement unless you run out of numbers.

[quartz bloom]

The perfect solution would obviously be getting rid of the global color pair identifiers tracker but I'm pretty sure that's not possible without rewriting ncurses

[quartz bloom]

That kinda seems ok, if I allocate a window every time a user clicks a new window in the gui, and I let multiple users use the same resources as I planned at the beginning I actually might run out of numbers, thanks for the idea

[shrewd stone]

@quartz bloom Has your question been resolved? If so, run !solved :)