Hello, I've started removal of support for pointers in Eolian in order to bring the language one level up and make it easier to do bindings. This has already been done for class handles and for complex types like array, hash, iterator etc. but currently one big obstacle in the way is strings. I have a pretty clear idea in my head but it's possible I might have missed something so I'm asking here if anyone has any feedback or ideas or whatever that I could have missed before implementing it.
Basically my idea currently is to introduce a new "string" builtin, which ALWAYS represents const char *. Mutable char pointers will not be possible with this system - I believe we don't want these either, because they're low level and represent something that you can change but not resize, plus it doesn't map well to various languages, especially scripting ones. I did some analysis on our API and it seems we actually have very few uses for mutable char pointers - there is currently only a handful of cases across the EFL, as opposed to countless const ones. APIs that currently use mutable char pointers would be dealt with on per-case basis and redesigned, probably to use something like Eina_Strbuf (in most cases; strbuf will get another builtin eolian type) with wrappers for legacy. Another thing is stringshares - I'm considering introducing another builtin for that, but maybe that won't be necessary. I gotta investigate more - again, there's only a handful of cases across the EFL anyways. Overall, removing pointers will benefit probably everyone, I believe. For one it will mean that there won't be any need to map pointer types to higher level languages in generators; another thing is that it means death of nested types in Eolian, which will make manipulation of types with the API much simpler. If you have any objections or notes, please bring them up. Otherwise, I will proceed with my approach. D5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
