51–60 of 110 posts
Heavy use of macros to do metaprogramming is a strong sign it's time to move to a more powerful language.
Lisp?
Granted, Lisp already has arrays, so not much reason to reinvent the wheel.
(make-array '(2 6) :initial-element 0 :element-type '(unsigned-byte 32))
;; => #2A((0 0 0 0 0 0) (0 0 0 0 0 0))I think this author should learn about the "do {} while(0)" trick.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but if you're writing code that you want to be bindable to other languages, you essentially have to follow the C ABI, in which case, writing in C is a natural choice (yes, you can expose a C ABI from other languages, but that's usually not natural and you sort of have to understand C anyway to do that).
Unless your API surface constitutes the majority of your code, writing in C still doesn't make sense, because you're paying the tax every time you have to manually juggle strings and whatnot. C++ is a more sensible choice for this - you can still write C-compatible headers (and it's trivial to verify in builds - just include it in a .c file and see if that compiles!) while using STL etc in the implementation.
If you're exposing structs that are passed back and forth for state, it's a bit more cumbersome.
DON'T USE THIS As fpoling points out, capacity is a 32-bit unsigned. That can overflow. There is no safety in append: if capacity is zero no new space will be made, if capacity overflows the realloc will not have enough space -- in either case, you end up writing past the end. Allocating a [capacity] zero array and appending to it is extremely common. That you'll write past the end in that case shows that the author…
In that scenario (where you're allocating a multi-gigabytes array), you typically know the size ahead of time, instead of growing it dynamically, as the latter doesn't really perform too well.
I think this author should learn about the "do {} while(0)" trick.
What's the benefit of do {...} while (0) vs just {...} ?
DON'T USE THIS As fpoling points out, capacity is a 32-bit unsigned. That can overflow. There is no safety in append: if capacity is zero no new space will be made, if capacity overflows the realloc will not have enough space -- in either case, you end up writing past the end. Allocating a [capacity] zero array and appending to it is extremely common. That you'll write past the end in that case shows that the author…
I think this author should learn about the "do {} while(0)" trick.
What's the benefit of do {...} while (0) vs just {...} ?
Heavy use of macros to do metaprogramming is a strong sign it's time to move to a more powerful language.
On one hand that's obviously true, on the other hand it's just 60 lines of code, which is easier to check and audit than (for instance) a typical std::vector implementation - I don't know what the equivalent is in D, please forgive my ignorance :)
Not an entirely uncommon idea. I've written one. There's also a well-known one here, in klib: https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib/blob/master/kvec.h
Who didn't. Almost any C program dealing with strings and collections has to have their own implementation or import one. Part of the reason why C developers "feel" productive, but can't produce anything of meaningful complexity.