Hello, just to let you know that I have recently tried to cleanup a bit the recent Position-Independent-Code that was contributed to the FreeType sources. While this works is really nice, I believe it represents a vast challenge in terms of maintanability for the people who don't care about PIC. Moreover, not all modules have been "converted" to PIC-compatible wrappers and deifnitions, and doing so is going to be very demanding.
I've started doing PIC-related changes on my own branch, which I just uploaded to the git server under the branch name "david-pic-changes" for you to look. My initial idea was to use macros and a heavy dose of pre-processing to simplify and reduce the PIC-related declarations needed in the source code. However, even after modifying a few things, it's clear that the end result is not tremendously more maintanable. The code is definitely shorter, and easier to modify, but it is also harder to comprehend. It's essentially equivalent to what you can do with a set of crazy templates in C++, and of course it's also as difficult to debug when something isn't just right. For this reason, I think we should try something more drastic to scale this approach. I'm mainly thinking about using a custom pre-processing tool (e.g. a custom Python script), that would translate a very simple and human-readable high-level description of each module and the constant structures it requires, into equivalent C code that could be compiled in PIC or non-PIC mode. I'll try to post more about that when I have something working, but wanted to let you know, in case you have other ideas on the subject. Regards - David
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