Hi Edward, thanks for bringing concepts of modern C to flashrom. +1 for using NULL and then falling back to a default implementation in the logic. IMO it makes the code much better.
-- Thomas On Fri, 2022-09-09 at 12:15 +1000, Edward O'Callaghan via flashrom wrote: > Hello, > > While refactoring flashrom.c to move towards a reentrant flashrom a > pragmatic choice of utilising NULLity to represent the default state > of a struct at instiation was used in the following and related > commits - https://review.coreboot.org/c/flashrom/+/67391/ > > It was brought to my attention that this is perhaps considered a more > substantive change to the general practice within flashrom and so I > just wanted to give a brief prelude to the rationale and if anyone > has any reason why they don't like it. > > Basically using NULL as the default state rather than an invalid > state allows for memory address by value to be in a boolean state of > either 'defined to be default' or 'defined to be custom' - over that > of a tristate of 'defiled to be default explicitly', 'defined to be > custom' or NULL which must be manually validated as 'invalid'. This > is quite pragmatic as we can rid ourselves of explicit nullarity > checks at runtime and instead have always defined reasonable defaults > at compile-time thus making functions domains more well defined at > compile-time. It is also pragmatic and arguably more modern from the > stand-point of requiring less code to effectively obtain a valid > value from the instantiated type not unlike Rust's Default trait or > Ada's ability to have default values in a Record and so on. > > While not particularly novel I did want to follow up on the request > to highlight it here. > > Kindly, > Edward. > _______________________________________________ > flashrom mailing list -- flashrom@flashrom.org > To unsubscribe send an email to flashrom-le...@flashrom.org _______________________________________________ flashrom mailing list -- flashrom@flashrom.org To unsubscribe send an email to flashrom-le...@flashrom.org
