It occurs to me that part of the learning curve problem with respect to BIOs
(and other aspects of OpenSSL) is that they're essentially an
object-oriented concept implemented in C. Or to put it another way, they're
a poor-man's polymorphism in C.
This makes me wonder whether a) perhaps a native C++ interface is in order
(with the inherent advantages and disadvantages); and b) should
object-oriented terminology be used in the documentation, as a pedagogical
tool? In other words (for the latter), perhaps the documentation should be
along the lines of: "A BIO is essentially an abstract class, but is
specified in C. You can implement your own particular BIO (analogous to
deriving an implementation class from an abstract class), by providing the
following functions (i.e. methods). Since this is C and not C++, you have
to make the methods available as follows...., and you have to explicitly
create (i.e. construct) and free (i.e. destroy)....
Note that the existing ssleay.txt already uses the term "method" but doesn't
really make the connection to the OO concept explicit.
Gary
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