Re: On the cost of libraries

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes:
> On 01Sep2001 03:58PM (-0700), Darin Adler wrote:
> > on 9/1/01 3:48 PM, Havoc Pennington at hp redhat com wrote:
> > 
> > > See GTK - use libtool:
> > > 
> > > # libtool option to control which symbols are exported
> > > # right now, symbols starting with _ are not exported
> > > LIBTOOL_EXPORT_OPTIONS='-export-symbols-regex "^[[^_]].*"'
> > > AC_SUBST(LIBTOOL_EXPORT_OPTIONS)
> > > 
> > > We make private symbols start with _, but if you didn't want to do
> > > that you can also have a file where you make a list of private
> > > symbols. libtool just uses the regexp to generate the file.
> > 
> > My own personal taste would be to generate the list of symbols to export
> > from a simple-minded "parse" of the public headers and make everything else
> > private. It seems like it might be straightforward to come up with a way to
> > do this that could be reused in various libraries.
> > 
> 
> I really like this idea. 

It sounds fine, the important thing IMO is that your system is
inline. That is, you can privatize/deprivatize by changing the source
files. The docs experience demonstrates pretty conclusively that to
keep things up to date they have to be right next to the code.

> I like it better than the underscore prefix
> convention, especially given the fact that symbols with leading
> underscores are in theory reserved to the C implementation.

You could use a different regexp you know. ;-) Not really a
fundamental property of this approach.

Havoc