Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1

Posted Jun 30, 2011 17:49 UTC (Thu) by davidz2525 (guest, #58065)
In reply to: Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1 by nix
Parent article: Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1

I think I even prefaced the word 'people' with 'smart' :-). But, yeah, I completely agree that we're both right which is why the guidance is to establish a policy on what to do when the programmer screws up rather than doing either A or B. I brought this up mostly to address the popular misconception that libdbus-1 is an evil library that eats babies - it's not.

(Btw, another misconception is that libdbus-1 is meant for applications to use; it's really not, it's more intended for a base that you can build language/toolkit bindings on top + the implementation used to implement dbus-daemon(1) which MUST be able to handle OOM.)

Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1

Posted Jun 30, 2011 21:12 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If it's a base that you can build language bindings on top of, then the libdbus-1 authors have even *less* idea than they might have as to what the process is doing, and it's even more critical that it should never die. (But it is true that a lot of Great Big Languages have no hope of handling OOM errors: dynamic allocation is too fundamental to them. However, for others this same property is a benefit, because they often have a lot of dynamically-allocated storage that they can get rid of, and even their own allocators so they can be sure the storage finds its way back to the OS again.)

Damn good articles btw.