Hi Paul, all,
> If we can break the dependencies at a relatively
> small cost, we should do that.
Yes, that's what Sam Steingold has been asking for, for years.
The costs that I can see are two-fold:
1) Additional modules; users have to read some documentation
before they can decide whether they need, say, 'strstr' or
'strstr-simple'.
2) When we duplicate a workaround idiom in several files, and the
workaround has to be extended, it's easy to miss some of
the occurrences of the idiom. For example, for including
<wctype.h>, we did
#include <wchar.h>
#include <wctype.h>
and then later discovered that we need to write
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <wctype.h>
and then again later found out that we need to write
#include <stddef.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <time.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <wctype.h>
> What we've done in the past is
> take a pragmatic approach: we support all the features that
> are generally needed by a stdlib's users or are easy to
> support, but when there's a definite cost for a feature that
> hardly anybody uses, we partition it off into an extra module.
Yup. And our estimation has been that code size is a cost -
which is why 'snprintf-posix' is a separate module from 'snprintf' -
but that .h files and .m4 macros come at virtually no cost.
Bruno
--
In memoriam Khosrow Golsorkhi <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khosrow_Golsorkhi>
