On 25/08/2008, "Paul LeoNerd Evans" wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Aug 2008 "Havoc Pennington" wrote:
>> If you're talking about converting existing APIs to refcounted
>> strings, that's a very different proposal from just adding some kind
>> of refcounted string feature. It would break thousands of apps, or
>> else duplicate hundreds of API entry points ...
> Personally, I didn't have in mind a change of existing API;
> simply an addition of something new:
While moderately handy, GString is nowhere near as useful as it could be, so
I'd say if you're going to add ref-counted strings than it's safe to just add
ref-count directly to GString. I doubt it'll have a notable impact even in
apps where it's not needed. I can't think of any occasion when I've actually
used a bare GString, it just doesn't do anything that can't be done better.
> typedef struct {
> gchar *str;
> gsize len;
> gint refcount;
> } GCString;
Your GCString, like my ZString below, is somewhat more useful due to the
ref-counting. But until it's supported in a useful way by GLib and GTK
natively, it may as well just be a chunk of text on a wiki page somewhere for
people to copy and paste verbatim into their own projects.
What I generally do is use a very simple GString wrapper;
typedef struct {
GString str;
gint refcount;
} ZString;
and then a bunch of #defines to wrap most of the GString functions with
appropriate type-casting back and forth. The only functions that actually need
re-implementing are the new/free ones. It ain't pretty, but it works.
> GCString *g_cstring_new_static(gchar *static_data);
> GCString *g_cstring_new_from_gstring(GString *clone);
> GCString *g_cstring_ref(GCString *str);
> void g_cstring_unref(GCstring *str);
GCString *g_cstring_new(gchar *dynamic_data);
which takes over ownership of an already-allocated string. len and
allocated_len are both set from strlen().
With an allocated_len field you can also indicate static string data by leaving
it at zero. (is_static = str && ! allocated_len) That also makes this useful:
GCString *g_cstring_new_full(gchar *dynamic_data, gint len, gint
allocated_len);
which does everything that all three of them do. If len is -ve, it's set from
strlen(), likewise if allocated_len is -ve, it's set from len. _new and
_new_static could then simply be wrappers to _new_full(), although being as
simple as they are it'd probably be better to keep them as discrete functions.
Fredderic
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