Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Nit

[Joshua Haberman]

On Sun, 2003-10-19 at 11:27, Charles Duffy wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-10-19 at 13:11, Joshua Haberman wrote:
> > 2) deserializers have to be written for every target language
> 
> Why's that?
> 
> Why couldn't someone interested in having a library interface (*ahem*)
> write just *one* deserializer exposed as a C library which could then be
> used by any language-specific interface?

Funny, this is exactly the argument for making libarch wrappable.  The
answer I've gotten is equivalent to:

"Because then the deserializer will take up memory and bugs in it could
make the language-specific interface crash.  The deserializer needs to
be in its own process."

Actually it's a pretty close analogy.  Program A wants to perform
operation B for which an implementation already exists.  Using B
involves exchanging non-trivial data structures.  How should program A
use the existing implementation of B?

For the original case, B is "manipulate arch archives and working
trees."  For this case, B is "deserialize data coming from tla on
stdin."

Josh