John et al, hoping Doug Baskins will reply to you as well, but in the meantime as a co-developer of libJudy, here's my $0.02 (and not worth much more I admit).
> Judy is one of the most useful libraries out there and I use it all > the time. VERY nice to hear that! We busted our butts for a couple of years, ultimately a team of four people, trying to make it world-class. But we discovered how hard it is to "sell a library," especially without academic credentials or writeups. HP ended up canceling the project, laying off the team, and open-sourcing the code in 2002. > Something that always bothered me about it is the somewhat unusual > calling conventions, the use of macros and silent casting of 'void *'s > meaning it is very easy to accidentally use the API incorrectly and > it's conventions differ from pretty much every other library out there > making combining code problematic. Yeah, yeah, we know, we know, sorry. I'm personally responsible for not envisioning the use of autoconf, etc, for greater portability, which is ironic since libJudy actually has minimal (very few) OS/library dependencies. > I went ahead and used c99's features (inline functions, immediate > struct values, defined uintptr_t and bool types) to make a typesafe > and more conformant api. OK, that's fun to watch. My only concern is our experience that it was way too easy to naively do something (like thread-safeness) that ruined the library's performance. You can't have too much run-time overhead going in and out or you can cut it in half, or even much worse. Syntactic sugar that doesn't overwhelm the algorithm -- great. Innocent layers of type-conversions or other foo, ugh. > I figured I post it if anyone else found it handy. Thanks for sharing it back in the spirit of open source. Let's see what others say, people who are more actively using libJudy. Me, I did use it successfully for a few projects later (contracting for HP and Avago), but retired a year ago. Cheers, Alan Silverstein ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Managing the Performance of Cloud-Based Applications Take advantage of what the Cloud has to offer - Avoid Common Pitfalls. Read the Whitepaper. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=121054471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Judy-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/judy-devel
