Re: [libvirt] (Dropping) OOM Handling in libvirt

On Mon, 2019-05-13 at 13:19 +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 02:00:28PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > > One possible complication is that we would not be able to use any > > of the GLib types in our public API... I think the way we should > > approach this is to consider the current public API as if it were > > yet another language binding, the language being plain C in this > > case, and make sure we have a very well defined boundary between > > them and everything else, basically treating them as a separate > > project that just so happens to live in the same repository and be > > developed in tandem. This should also make it easier for us to > > switch to a different programming language in the future, should > > we decide to. > > I'm not sure why you say we can't use GLib types in our public API ? > > I think we could use them, but I'd probably suggest we none the less > choose not to use them in public API, only internally :-) > > But I'm anticipating we could replace virObject, with GObject, and as > such all the virXXXXXPtr types in our public API would become GObjects. > I think we'd likely keep them as opaque types though, despite the fact > that they'd be GObjects, to retain our freedom to change impl again > later if we wish. > > I won't think we need to change use of 'long long' to 'gint64', etc > Not least because because GLib maintainers themselves are questioning > whether to just mandate stdint.h types.

> This is fairly minor though. I was mostly thinking about this latter example and other situations along those lines. For example, we'll definitely need to start using gchar* internally,

and since we don't want that implementation detail exposed in our plain C bindings,

then we'll have to do at least some very lightweight conversion (casting) between that and char*. This is one of the examples where considering the existing API as a language binding would IMHO result in a maintainable structure.