On Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:19:44 -0700 Will Jones <will.jones...@gmail.com> wrote: > In a discussion about new additions to C++ docs, someone had a question: > Should we even be documenting this? > > Long-time contributors to Arrow C++ noted that many parts were written > without the intention that those APIs would not be used directly.
Well, the parts that were not written for outside use are typically not documented :-) I suppose that answers the question... > Which parts of the C++ libraries are considered public? And are we > effectively delineating that for our users? The publicly documented parts, effectively. Now *some* non-documented parts may also be considered public, if we simply forgot documenting them (which is bad, but happens unfortunately). It's also true that our header files expose some APIs that are not means to be public (and normally not documented). That's difficult to avoid with C++. Some of them are explicitly marked "internal" (for example by virtue of being in the "arrow::internal" namespace), but we haven't been very consistent in this (*). (*) Making things more consistent would be welcome. It requires some work and careful thinking. Regards Antoine.
