Re: ABI, "public" variables

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Andrius Bentkus wrote:

> Hello,
> I'm currently writing some some bindings for my favorite language, it has
> the ability to access publicly exposed C functions.
> The problem I am facing now is that there are some objects which are of
> utter importance and yet they are exposed not using extern functions, which
> makes it impossible to write bindings with languages which feature extern C
> function access.
>
> So, my suggestion is to make all the public variable additionally accessible
> with c functions in order to avoid unnecessary wrappers.

Without a specific example, I'm not sure which case you're referring to.
The cases that I recall are all contrived to present a consistent 
interface to C, which can be hard to map to other languages.

There are some that are only macros (such as getyx) because there's
no way to make a C function with the same parameters, but there are
workarounds for that case.

For the library configured with support for reentrancy - that does rely
a lot on macros to hide private functions (which happen to all be declared
extern in curses.h).

(I'll be out of town for a few days - am getting ready to go this 
evening).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net