On 2014-03-16 00:11, Marco Leise wrote:
What about the way Microsoft went with the Win32 API?
- struct fields are exposed
- layouts may change only by appending fields to them
- they are always passed by pointer
- the actual size is stored in the first data field
I think this is worth a look. Since all these function calls
don't come for free. (Imagine a photo management software
that has to check various properties of 20_000 images.)
The modern runtime for Objective-C has a non-fragile ABI for its
classes. Instead of accessing a field with an compile time known offset
an offset calculated at runtime/load time is used when accessing a
field. This allows to freely reorganize fields without breaking subclasses.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
