Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > Are XMALLOC et al. part of the public API, or are they only internal
> > helper macros?
They are public API. This can be seen from the fact that
- the macro is defined in xalloc.h,
- the module description modules/xalloc lists this file as the file to
include:
Include:
"xalloc.h"
> They're not documented anywhere other than the source code.
Yes, many Gnulib APIs are only documented in the .h files. In the manual we
tend to only give a high-level overview (if at all).
> > Are there current users of it (apart from gnulib itself)?
GNU gettext uses the XMALLOC macro in more than 100 places. It's
just so convenient to do a memory allocation in 1 line of code:
op->token = XMALLOC (struct token);
> > I'm interested in discussing some details about that set of
> > macros if they're not set in stone.
Go ahead. Maybe your suggestions can be useful for another set of macros?
Paul Eggert wrote:
> They're a
> bit controversial in the sense that I would rather not see their use
> proliferate.
I disagree with that. They are very useful for application-level code:
concise, and with error-checking included.
I know that in some places, such as readutmp.c, you like to optimize several
memory allocations into a single one. But in other places, namely in
applications where the maintainability is of higher priority than the
execution speed, it's perfectly OK to do one memory allocation for each
piece of a data structure.
> In a sense they're a poor substitute for C++ templates and my feeling is
> that if you want C++ you should use C++.
Nah. C++ is a big waste of developers' time, for so many reasons. We
shouldn't push developers towards this ill-designed language.
Bruno
