As much as I'd like things as short as possible, I'd prefer names and 
capitalization have as much symmetry as possible between the C++ and C 
interfaces. For users trying to make sense of the APIs, we want to honor the 
"principle of least surprise."

But I'd certainly defer to modern C sensibilities, however they have evolved 
their practices without true namespaces and classes.



> On Oct 19, 2020, at 5:23 PM, Scott Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Yeah, I think we'd want to target C99, because as far as I know, most things 
> with a C ffi target C99.
> 
> I'll try to gather a list of C projects to see how they name things. Also, 
> I'll probably share some of how Rust names functions and methods to hopefully 
> gather some more options.
> 
> On Mon., Oct. 19, 2020, 3:55 p.m. Anders Langlands, 
> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> I’d personally prefer to see if we could shorten the names a little so 
> “oiio_ii_open” instead of “OIIO_ImageInput_open” if we could make sure that 
> there wouldn’t be any abbreviation conflicts. The long form does have the 
> advantage that it’s unambiguous though. 
> 
> Regarding standards, Visual Studio has only just added support for C11 and 
> C17 in preview and I don’t think we’d need anything beyond C99 for an API 
> wrapper anyway?
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 10:18, Larry Gritz <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> I've been in C++ land for so long that I'm afraid I don't know the idioms 
> that modern C culture likes these days. Is what you describe 
> OIIO_ImageInput_open or OIIO_ImageBufAlgo_add... does that look like the way 
> a 2020 C programmer would try to "namespace" things in C that has no 
> namespaces? Or would a C programmer scoff at how wordy it is?
> 
> As far as how to name overloads... I think it might be instructive to look at 
> a few individual cases first and what feels right, then see if they 
> generalize into an overall rule. I'm hesitant to propose a rule first without 
> examples to know if we're going to hate it in practice.
> 
> Which C standard would you want to target?
> 
>       -- lg
> 
> 
>> On Oct 19, 2020, at 1:51 PM, Scott Wilson <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> 
>> Sounds good to me. Also, if you want to automate the c bindings to some 
>> degree, then you can look at https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/physx-rs 
>> <https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/physx-rs> for inspiration. There's a talk 
>> in the readme with their c bindings builder. Failing that, I'm fine with 
>> going through the legwork of making the c interface.
>> 
>> If I may make a suggestion for the naming, I'd suggest more or less 
>> following what OIIO does in C++. So, for example, OIIO::ImageInput.open(...) 
>> would be OIIO_ImageInput_open(...) and classes/structs would be 
>> OIIOImageInput.
>> 
>> The only question I have at the moment is how do we want to handle naming 
>> functions with overrides?
>> 
>> On Mon., Oct. 19, 2020, 1:00 p.m. Anders Langlands, 
>> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Branching this thread to talk specifics...
>> 
>> So to summarize the different approaches we've each taken, in my repo 
>> (https://github.com/anderslanglands/oiio-rs/tree/master/coiio 
>> <https://github.com/anderslanglands/oiio-rs/tree/master/coiio>) I have a 
>> small shim library that creates a C interface to OIIO by wrapping with 
>> functions like:
>> 
>> ImageBuf ImageBuf_create(const char* filename) {
>>     return new OIIO::ImageBuf(OIIO::string_view(filename));
>> }
>> 
>> When building the rust crate, this is compiled into a static library by 
>> Cargo using CMake, with the environment variable OIIO_ROOT specifying the 
>> path to the OIIO installation. Currently the build script errors out if 
>> OIIO_ROOT is not specified, but it would be trivial to have it default to 
>> /usr/local etc. I also at one point had it downloading OIIO and building it 
>> directly, but cmake-rs had some issues with always rebuilding OIIO on any 
>> change to the crate, which made development interminable, so I stripped that 
>> out. That was nearly two years ago so may have been fixed. A good 
>> alternative would be to provide a separate (bash or python) build script 
>> that would download deps and run the build manually as a pre-process.
>> 
>> From what I can tell from Scott's repo, cxx is doing essentially the same 
>> thing, but cxx handles building the shim library internally, so there's no 
>> need for invoking CMake from build.rs <http://build.rs/>. Presumably you'd 
>> still need to specify the path to (and potentially build) OIIO and its deps 
>> using this method. If you compare the code in Scott's repo to mine, you can 
>> see they're very similar indeed.
>> 
>> The issue I see here is that I don't think cxx actually saves you anything. 
>> In fact there's *more* code in the cxx case because you're specifying both 
>> the implementation (ffi.cpp) and the interface (ffi.h), whereas I only have 
>> to specify the implementation (coiio.cpp) and the interface is declared 
>> solely in ffi.rs <http://ffi.rs/>.
>> 
>> Building and linking the static library is the easiest part of the process, 
>> and is also the part that would be more generally useful outside of just 
>> Rust - you could use that C interface to trivially bind any language you 
>> want, so I think we want to preserve that.
>> 
>> That leaves the question of how do we generate the C interface in the first 
>> place. I've been doing it manually, which is a tedious process, but works. 
>> Since it's just calling the C++ directly I think it's also reasonably sturdy 
>> against changes to the underlying OIIO API, since the compiler should catch 
>> most misuses, although I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities for subtle 
>> bugs still. Not to mention bikeshedding about naming conventions and code 
>> styles :)
>> 
>> My idea for how to make the binding generation more automatic was to try and 
>> leverage libclang to generate the C wrappers semi-automatically. This would 
>> still require a fair amount of code: first writing the binding generator, 
>> then writing the rules for how to wrap the C++ API, but should allow 
>> generating the C API automatically, rather than maintaining it manually for 
>> every release. The downside is obviously this tool doesn't exist yet, and it 
>> would add a (optional) dependency on clang to the project.
>> 
>> I think the best course of action here would be to write a C wrapper in OIIO 
>> itself that could be maintained along with the rest of the project. This 
>> would build a little C99 library that could be installed alongside the C++ 
>> library. This would unfortunately mean manually writing a header to go with 
>> it, although that part could probably be automated with a little scripting.
>> 
>> Then oiio-rs should be a completely separate Rust crate that just uses 
>> bindgen to generate the unsafe API from the C library automatically, and 
>> provides a safe API on top of that. (Larry - Rust/Cargo kinda assumes that 
>> Cargo is the thing doing all the building and dependency management, so 
>> trying to provide a Rust artefact from the OIIO build process would be 
>> painful if it's possible at all).
>> 
>> Let me know what you think.
>> 
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Anders
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 at 02:53, Alvaro Castaneda <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Hi Larry and Anders
>> I'm helping Scott with the Rust Wrapper.
>> using CXX is been good, it is a very manual process and makes it only usable 
>> in Rust, Larry you mentioned a minimal C API, that would make it much 
>> simpler to wrap to Rust, that would also mean in can be wrapped to many 
>> other languages, 
>> So far we didn't want to go the C route, but that might not be a bad idea 
>> since it would open the library a lot more and it might make it simpler to 
>> automate, at least the bulk of it, for Rust.
>> 
>> We need to discuss the approach.
>> 
>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 8:40 PM Anders Langlands <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Hi Scott, yes please do add me to the repo I’d love to take a look and pitch 
>> in as time allows. 
>> 
>> On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 13:43, Scott Wilson <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Hey Anders,
>> 
>> Cxx has so far been pretty okay. It's pretty manual (hopefully autocxx makes 
>> it better, but as far as I know, it's still nowhere ready for using it on 
>> OpenImageIO). Right now the process looks something like this:
>> 
>> 1. Create a header/cpp file that contains all of your class methods as 
>> functions.
>> 2. Create an unsafe Rust interferface that's a 1 to 1 copy of the C++ side.
>> 3. Create a safe Rust interface.
>> 
>> For me, the really nice thing is I don't need to worry about the C++ -> C -> 
>> Rust steps. It drops the C step, but I still need to write that C++ "ugly" 
>> interface.
>> 
>> Also, if you want to join in on the fun, our repo is currently private while 
>> we get things to a working state. But, I can add you to the repo. Otherwise, 
>> I'm up for a discussion on how to take both designs and come up with the 
>> best one.
>> 
>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 4:51 PM Anders Langlands <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Wrapping C in Rust is a two-stage process: first writing an "unsafe" FFI 
>> binding to the C API, which is usually almost completely automated with a 
>> crate called bindgen, then writing a "safe" crate that provides a Rust-y API 
>> using the unsafe FFI bindings. Wrapping C++ means writing a C API first, 
>> then binding that to Rust, which is what my crate does.
>> 
>> I've been meaning to return to this (and OSL, OpenSubdiv and others) at some 
>> point and try to make a project-specific C-binding generator using libclang, 
>> as manually maintaining the C stubs is laborious and error-prone. 
>> 
>> Scott, I'd be curious to know how you're getting on with cxx, I've been 
>> meaning to look into that. I'd be happy to collaborate on something we could 
>> integrate into the main project as Larry suggests.
>> 
>> On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 12:30, Larry Gritz <[email protected] 
>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> Feel free to have the discussion on-list, I'm sure it would be of interest 
>> to many.
>> 
>> If there was consensus on what the Rust APIs should look like, I would 
>> welcome adding a set of Rust bindings to the main OIIO distribution. 
>> Assuming that makes sense, I was thinking it would be much like we now have 
>> with the Python bindings. The advantage to making Rust bindings part of the 
>> main build would be that it could be built and tested as part of our CI, 
>> versioned along with the rest of OIIO, and essentially never allowed to 
>> break. Also, just like we would never accept a PR that added C++ 
>> functionality without making sure the Python bindings kept up, we could 
>> ensure that nothing is left out of the Rust bindings. While I can appreciate 
>> the cleanliness and independence of it being a separate project, I can't 
>> help but think that it will be a neverending nightmare to try to keep the 
>> bindings in sync with the main project.
>> 
>> I don't know how automated it is to make Rust bindings for C (I know it's a 
>> PITA for C++), but if making Rust bindings is substantially easier if you 
>> had minimal plain C wrappers for the major C++ classes, I'm sure there would 
>> be a lot of happy consumers of that even outside the Rust interest group.
>> 
>> I haven't had time to try Rust myself for any programming project, though 
>> I've followed it from afar and like the idea of helping that community. TBH, 
>> the main thing that keeps me from spending any time on Rust is just that I 
>> can't contemplate the hassle of trying to program without my favourite 
>> libraries, and having OIIO (and its many utilities that I reuse in basically 
>> everything I write) available in Rust will substantially lower the bar for 
>> me to dabble in it more.
>> 
>>      -- lg
>> 
>> 
>>> On Oct 18, 2020, at 4:12 PM, Scott Wilson <[email protected] 
>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hey Anders,
>>> 
>>> We were inspired by what you did, and also decided to see if we can take 
>>> this in a slightly different direction/ use cxx. If you're interested in 
>>> discussing the wrapper more we can take it off the list.
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 3:35 PM Anders Langlands <[email protected] 
>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> I also have a rust binding here if you're interested: 
>>> https://github.com/anderslanglands/oiio-rs 
>>> <https://github.com/anderslanglands/oiio-rs>
>>> On Sun, 18 Oct 2020 at 04:43, Scott Wilson <[email protected] 
>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> Awesome, thank you very much! I'll try this out and see how badly I break 
>>> things.
>>> 
>>> On Sat., Oct. 17, 2020, 1:02 a.m. Larry Gritz, <[email protected] 
>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>> If you know the true legal extent of the memory allocation in which that 
>>> data pointer is located (in this case, the beginning and ending of the 
>>> vector, if you are passing a pointer to one of the elements of that 
>>> vector), then I think you could certainly consider it an error if any of 
>>> these addresses lay outside that buffer:
>>> 
>>>     data + xstride*width - 1
>>>     data + ystride*height - 1
>>>     data + ystride*(height - 1) + xstride*width - 1
>>>     data + zstride*depth
>>>     data + zstride*(depth - 1) + ystride*height - 1
>>>     data + zstride*(depth - 1) + ystride*(height - 1) + xstride*width - 1
>>> 
>>> There may be a more succinct way to put that, but I think it covers all the 
>>> cases of + and - strides.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Oct 17, 2020, at 12:42 AM, Scott Wilson <[email protected] 
>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Thanks! I guess to come from this at a different angle, let's say I'm 
>>>> doing something like this:
>>>> 
>>>> std::vector<uint8_t> pixels(10*10*3*1);
>>>> ImageInput.read_image(TypeDesc::UINT8, @pixels[0])
>>>> 
>>>> Would there be a case where I could pick a stride value that would fall 
>>>> outside the pixels vector?
>>>> 
>>>> PS: Thanks! I'm working on this with a friend, and hope to have something 
>>>> released in the near future.
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri., Oct. 16, 2020, 11:47 p.m. Larry Gritz, <[email protected] 
>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>> Oops, my math was wrong (in an unimportant detail): If you are making a 
>>>> mosaic of 16x5 of these 10x10 images, it is 80 small images you are 
>>>> assembling in total, not 40.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Oct 16, 2020, at 11:43 PM, Larry Gritz <[email protected] 
>>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> The strides don't describe the size of the image, they are the spacing in 
>>>>> memory of where you want the values to be placed upon being read (or 
>>>>> taken from in order to write). There is no invalid set of strides, 
>>>>> because the caller might want them to end up anywhere in memory.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Or am I misunderstanding?
>>>>> 
>>>>> For a fully "contiguous" memory buffer where you intend for every plane, 
>>>>> scanline, pixel, and channel immediately follows the previous one, then 
>>>>> in our example the strides would be xstride=3, ystride=30, zstride=300. 
>>>>> (Though for a 2D image, the zstride is not used.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> Here's an example of where you might have a stride range that is wildly 
>>>>> outside this: Let's say that you have 40 of these 10 x 10 x 3 x uint8 
>>>>> image files and you are trying to read them in and assemble them into a 
>>>>> single RGBA mosaic image of 16x5 x 4 x uint8 (the additional channel is 
>>>>> alpha, which you will separately fill in as 1.0 [or 255 uint8] because 
>>>>> it's not in your RGB files).  Here's a cartoon to illustrate this:
>>>>> 
>>>>>   +-----------------------------------------+
>>>>>   | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
>>>>>   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-|
>>>>>   | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
>>>>>   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-|
>>>>>   | | | | | | | | | |X| | | | | | | | | | | |
>>>>>   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-|
>>>>>   | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
>>>>>   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-|
>>>>>   | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
>>>>>   +-----------------------------------------+
>>>>> 
>>>>> Each of my little grid cells is a 10x10 image. But that 10x10 image 
>>>>> denoted by the "X" needs to be placed in memory in the right portion of 
>>>>> the 16x10 x 5x10 mosaic. So what are the strides we use for the read? 
>>>>> Well, the xstride is 4 because we're making room for an alpha channel 
>>>>> that wasn't present in the file, the ystride is 640 (= 10*16*4), because 
>>>>> each scanline of the little 10x10 image that you read needs to be placed 
>>>>> on the proper scanline of the 160x50 mosaic you are assembling in memory.
>>>>> 
>>>>>   --  lg
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> P.S. Woo-hoo for making a Rust wrapper. I think that's a totally great 
>>>>> thing.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Oct 16, 2020, at 10:46 PM, Scott Wilson <[email protected] 
>>>>>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I'm experimenting with a Rust wrapper for OIIO, and had some questions 
>>>>>> about the stride.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Let's say I have an image that is 10x10 pixels, and 3 channels, and 1 
>>>>>> byte per channel. What strides would be invalid for that image? I'm 
>>>>>> guessing that anything between -10 * 10 * 3 * 1 to 10 * 10 * 3 * 1 and 
>>>>>> the AutoStride would be valid, and everything else may try to access 
>>>>>> memory that isn't initialized. Is this assumption correct, or am I 
>>>>>> missing something?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Thanks!
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> Oiio-dev mailing list
>>>>>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>>>>> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org 
>>>>>> <http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org>
>>>>> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> Larry Gritz
>>>>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Oiio-dev mailing list
>>>>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>>>> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org 
>>>>> <http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org>
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Larry Gritz
>>>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org 
>>>> <http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org>
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>>>> <http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org>
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Larry Gritz
>>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> http://lists.openimageio.org/listinfo.cgi/oiio-dev-openimageio.org 
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>> 
>> --
>> Larry Gritz
>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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> 
> --
> Larry Gritz
> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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--
Larry Gritz
[email protected]




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