I would be interested in the specifics of the spaces thing (knowing more about ones tools is good) but "10 minutes" to handle all the various issues and bugs that will inevitably pop up from wrangling macros?
Re:Getting Past C
by lacampbell on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @10:46PM
(#13315513)
Yeah 10 minutes is quite a bit off, at least for me. The various issues and bugs that arose all came about when developing the data structures themselves - they didn't crop up in actual usage. Though my approach was to use a separate header and source file for each new data type I parameterised them by. So I had an "int_array.c" and an "int_array.h". And inside the header would just be function declarations generated by the macro. I basically didn't like the idea of dumping in a whole implementation of a data structure and all its operations with a macro every single time I wanted to use it. YMMV but I found it worked well.
That approach of a single invocation was what I would personally assume would be done (or put it in the header that defines the data type, for a custom one), but I'm not sure how that solves spaces?
No more spaces:
typedef unsigned char uchar;
DECLARE_AND_IMPLEMENT_ARRAY_API(uchar)Having worked in a code base like this (prior to migration to C++11), I'd agree that they're not necessarily a "nightmare", but they lead to code that's so verbose that it tends to really obscure the actual logic of a piece of code. (Especially anything more complicated than a simple array, e.g. associative maps or multi-dimensional arrays, and iteration constructs can be hellish.)
I actually did this¹⋅² some time ago. Since then I've moved on from a hardcore C developer to C++ and Ada³, but it wasn't necessarily a bad solution. I think given how little C gives you to work with, it's the best solution you can do.
It does make debugging a chore. I ended up with a Makefile rule to run the test suite through the preprocessor (and did some hackery to exclude #include of system headers), format it with clang-format, and build that. Not exactly pretty or easy, but it got the job done.
1. https://github.com/alpha123/yu/blob/master/src/yu_splaytree....
2. https://github.com/alpha123/yu/blob/master/test/test_splaytr...
3. Where this sort of thing is much easier and I am happier and more productive.
They're not an ideal solution by any stretch, but it's not the nightmare scenario you envision wrt generic data structures in C.