On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, Szak�ts Viktor wrote:
The mingw approach cannot be easily implemented to support
all compilers, plus it needs to be done after creating
all libs, creating hbextern but before creating the rest
of tools (noteably hbrun). So it's tricky.
And it's the reason why it always returns correct
information and any other solutions have to be manually
synced. I do not see any difference in adding some special
comments to source code and adding new line to hbextern.ch
Both are manual job so I'd prefer updating hbextern.ch.
Well, I used to update hbextern.ch, and it's not a pleasant
cleanup work. It's also imperfect as it's easy to miss an
update.
But back to the source comment. This would ONLY be needed
for cases where there is anything special with the symbol,
in most cases when the symbol is conditionally compiled.
The rest of symbols (the waste majority of them) doesn't
need any extra markup.
Such markup information is much easier to maintain inside
the source code itself, than in a separate file (hbextern.ch),
which most developers doesn't even know about. Okay both
can be missed, but in-code is closer to the actual
development, so the chance is lower, and we're adding such
conditional symbols to core VERY rarely anyway, so in
practice this would be a one time job.
In such version we have everything in one place and we can
very easy verify if all functions are present using nm and
update it. We can even write small .prg tool which will make
it automatically and show missing functions. GCC/NM is
available for all platforms.
As an alternative to current non-fully automated hbextern
solution, it could be one (although still compiler dependent).
What I had in mind though is a solution which is fully
automatic and sync between hbextern.ch and actual symbols
are always guaranteed. With nm tool, this isn't the case.
I also cannot see how the nm solution can be well
integrated into the build process, even manually. Say,
a user wants to create a non-HB_COMPAT_C53 build for BCC.
First of all, he needs to create a build with *MINGW*,
run the nm tool on that just to generate hbextern.ch,
then with the exact same build switches, he needs to
create a new BCC build (so that hbrun picks the right
hbextern.ch file).
To me this doesn't look very practical.
Brgds,
Viktor
_______________________________________________
Harbour mailing list
Harbour@harbour-project.org
http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
