On 2/28/07, Marvin Humphrey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Of course you could also have public and private include files.
Hmm, can you elaborate? I'd basically given up hope that we'd be
able to maintain tight control over symbol export, and was expecting
to define the API via documentation only.
I haven't tried this before and I'm not sure if other large C projects
do this but I was thinking you could have two sets of include files;
one that contains the public API and the other used to contain methods
used internally within Lucy. For example, an IndexWriter.h and an
IndexWriter_private.h.
One way I am planning on cutting down on public methods is by keeping
the unit tests in the same file as the source code, surrounding them
with an #ifdef UNIT_TESTS. A lot of the methods in Ferret would be
static except that I needed to make them available for unit testing.
<snip/>
Now, returning to your point about Doxygen... With XML, we'd have to
maintain separate files for the documentation, which would suck. So
I'm all for using Doxygen, especially if we can rig things up so that
the description can be isolated and parsed out reliably.
I might go write an extractor tool which parses our header files and
generates intermediate XML.
Well, I definitely think it might be a good idea to look at doxygen
and see if you can hook into its parser. I'm pretty sure it parses the
C code as well as the comments so it might do most of the work for
you.
Then bindings authors could write their
own final translation utilities in their language of choice, and use
as much or as little as they wish.
Hopefully they'd use more rather than less. It's to the user's
benefit for various bindings to present reasonably consistent APIs
while still being idiomatic, because it makes it easier to apply what
you learned about one of them to another.
I agree to a certain extent. However, when I released the first
version of Ferret, a lot of people complained the interface was too
Java-like. It can be difficult to find the happy medium between making
the interface easy for people who used Lucy in a different language
and people who their Ruby/Perl/PHP library to work in a certain way.
But if you wanted to take this route (making it possible for binding
authors to generate some/most of the binding from some XML files), how
about using SWIG?
--
Dave Balmain
http://www.davebalmain.com/
