On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 12:06:50PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
On Fri, 2018-05-25 at 10:04 +0200, Pavel Hrdina wrote:
On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 09:13:51AM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
However, I realize it might not be possible to register free functions for a native type without having to introduce something like
typedef char * virString;
thus causing massive churn. How does GLib deal with that?
If you would look into GLib documentation you would see that this design basically copies the one in GLib:
Sorry, I should have looked up the documentation and implementation before asking silly questions. Guess the morning coffee hadn't quite kicked in yet :/
GLib libvirt
g_autofree VIR_AUTOFREE g_autoptr VIR_AUTOPTR g_auto VIR_AUTOCLEAR
For what it's worth, I think VIR_AUTOCLEAR is a much better name than g_auto :)
In GLib you are using them like this:
g_autofree char *string = NULL; g_autoptr(virDomain) dom = NULL; g_auto(virDomain) dom = { 0 };
So yes it would require to introduce a lot of typedefs for basic types and that is not worth it.
I'm not sure we would need so many typedefs, but there would certainly be a lot of churn involved.
Personally, I'm not so sure it wouldn't be worth the effort, but it's definitely something that we can experiment with it at a later time instead of holding up what's already a pretty significant improvement.
In libvirt we would have:
VIR_AUTOFREE char *string = NULL; VIR_AUTOPTR(virDomainPtr) dom = NULL; VIR_AUTOCLEAR(virDomain) dom = { 0 };
If you notice the difference, in libvirt we can use virDomainPtr directly because we have these typedefs, in GLib macro G_DEFINE_AUTOPTR_CLEANUP_FUNC creates similar typedef.
While I'm not a fan of our *Ptr typedefs in general, I guess this time I'm glad we have them because VIR_AUTOPTR() doesn't hide the fact that what you're declaring is a pointer; that is, the macro argument is also exactly the type of the variable.
So let's make a summary of how it could look like: VIR_AUTOFREE(char *) string = NULL; VIR_AUTOPTR(virDomainPtr) vm = NULL; VIR_AUTOCLEAR(virDomain) dom = { 0 }; VIR_DEFINE_AUTOFREE_FUNC(virDomainPtr, virDomainFree); VIR_DEFINE_AUTOCLEAR_FUNC(virDomain, virDomainClear); Note: don't take the types and function names as something that actually exists and be used like that, it's just an example to show how it would work :). Pavel