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Postings from July 2012
On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 04:13:05PM -0700, Rev. Chip wrote: > I think STRLEN, MEM_SIZE, and Size_t should be straight-up no-configure > typedefs or defines of size_t now, kept only for backcompat of XS code; and > the Perl source code proper should use size_t throughout. C89 is oooold > now; we can count on it. Should we also have a (documented) policy of progressively removing other things that were needed to work around pre-C89 compilers, and other dead things? Specifically, I'm aware of VOL in case your pre-C89 compiler doesn't understand volatile StructCopy in case your pre-C89 compiler can't copy structures STATIC under PerlObject, static functions were actually private methods What else is there? I don't know if it's worth having a one time purge on these, or stating that new and edited code should use the better forms. Specifically, from the point of view of blame logs for history spelunking, STATIC only happens on the start of a line, and only shares it with the function's return type or prototype, which rarely changes. This also makes it unlikely to cause lots of pain with patch cherry picking. VOL is rare. It's simply not going to be a big deal on either. I assumed that StructCopy was endemic, but it's not. It's also not in platform specific code. So it's probably not a big deal. The historic "big deal" that was really frustrating when it came to cherry picks (conflicts!) and still is when it comes to blame analysis of what changed when, are commits that make minor changes to the variables or structures of a lot of functions, orthogonal to functionality and orthogonal to source file*. These have small substantive gain (but if not done carefully can and did introduce bugs https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=77300 ), but turned out to have long term subtle costs. Nicholas Clark * source file mattered under perforce, because of the granularity of how it tracks what has been integrated. But until I worked with it a lot, I didn't appreciate that a lot of the code paths/functional groupings in perl 5 cross-cut the source files, instead of going with them. The source files are not the only dimension that matters.Thread Previous | Thread Next