Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com> writes:
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.
Interesting. Got a link?
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,
Are you sure about "definitely"? gchar is merely a typedef name for char...
and since we don't want that implementation detail exposed in our plain C bindings,
Yup, letting GLib's typedef names for ordinary C types leak into your public headers would be a mistake.
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.
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