Open Steelskin opened 9 years ago
Summary of old comments:
Thanks much for your interest in open-vcdiff, and for sharing your feedback.
I think the use of
const char*
versusconst void*
is debatable.Passing a
const char*
for dictionary_contents specifies unambiguously the units in whichdictionary_size
is expressed: the dictionary containsdictionary_size
char
values (bytes.) One of my colleagues pointed out that this has the advantage that a pointer to the end of the dictionary can be found by calculatingdictionary_contents + dictionary_size
; such a calculation would not work with avoid*
and would require an explicit cast.On the other hand, standard functions such as
memcmp
andmemcpy
takevoid*
arguments to represent pointers to contiguous bytes. The existence of those interfaces supports your position.As another reference point from the compression milieu, zlib uses
Bytef*
for its input and output, which is a typedef forunsigned char*
.Would anyone else care to offer an opinion on this issue?
Answer:
- The type 'size_t' already unambiguously denotes a byte count.
- Your point about offsetting from the dictionary pointer relates to the library implementation; but the design of an API should give the convenience of clients higher priority (unless it would severely penalize the implementation, of course.) So I don't think it's a good balance to require clients to cast the pointers, just to save a few casts in the implementation. [Also, FYI, gcc allows pointer arithmetic on
void*
for exactly this reason.]
My personal opinion is that the API should be changed to use void*
Just my $0.02: I prefer uint8_t*
for byte buffers.
Original issue 4 created by Jens.Alfke on 2008-09-05T20:28:44.000Z:
Several API methods take parameters that are pointers to arbitrary binary data. These parameters are typed as "const char*". Because of this, clients of the API that have data stored in other types, have to static_cast their pointers to pass them to vcdiff.
Instead, vcdiff's API should use "const void" instead of "const char". This permits any const pointer to be passed in without a type-cast, and also makes it clear to the human reader that the method takes arbitrary data, not just C strings. This is the usual convention in C/C++ APIs nowadays.
As a specific example, change vcencoder.h:70 from: HashedDictionary(const char* dictionary_contents, size_t dictionary_size); to: HashedDictionary(const void* dictionary_contents, size_t dictionary_size); (There are other instances of this at other points in the API.)