On Dec 18, 2006, at 11:06 PM, David Balmain wrote:
Actually, I like this more than the code below. To me the braces help,
not hinder. But to each his own I guess. Also, we could macrofy this
if wanted to;
#define DOG_DATA(name) {\
name,\
(Animal_speak_t) Dog_speak,\
(Animal_eat_t) Dog_eat\
},\
Dog_chase_cats
/* in Animal/Dog.c */
const DOG DOG_CLASSDATA = {
DOG_DATA("Animal::Dog")
};
/* in Animal/Dog/PitBull.c */
const PIT_BULL PIT_BULL_CLASSDATA = {
{
DOG_DATA("Animal::Dog::PitBull")
},
PitBull_chase_humans
};
It turns out that we don't have to resort to manual intervention like
this at all.
boilerplater.pl generates a model of the complete inheritance
hierarchy. Each class is represented by a Class object which knows
its parent, its children, its member variables, its class functions,
and its instance methods, including which methods are inherited or
overridden.
With that information in hand, it's possible to resolve all inherited
members, both for the object struct defs and for the virtual table
struct defs.
It might be a smidge faster. More importantly, it's oodles easier to
maintain and there's a lot less potential for error when this stuff
gets handled automatically.
With macros I don't think it makes that much difference but I'm sure
you'll be able to enlighten me as to where my macro example fails, in
which case, bootstrapping is fine with me. When you said bootstrapping
initially I was think memory allocation but if that isn't happening
then I don't have a problem with it.
Prodded by your discontent, I built a solution which resolves the
virtual tables at compile time. :) They're const. No bootstrapping.
I feel the same way but Valgrind + Ruby = :(.
Bummer. Well, at least Perl works with Valgrind on Linux, so we'll
be able to run all wrapped C tests that way.
This is one of the
things that got me thinking about building a database like search
engine which runs in a separate process to Ruby as a server, but that
is a whole other story.
If we allow the user to specify the serialization of Document, Lucy
becomes an object database. :)
Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.com/
