On 01/09/2017 09:58 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
For those who don't already know, GCC and CLang both implement a C language extension that enables automatic free'ing of resources when variables go out of scope. This is done by annotating the variable with the "cleanup" attribute, pointing to a function the compiler will wire up a call to when unwinding the stack. Since the annotation points to an arbitrary user defined function, you're not limited to simple free() like semantics. The cleanup function could unlock a mutex, or decrement a reference count, etc This annotation is used extensively by systemd, and libguestfs, amongst other projects. This obviously doesn't bring full garbage collection to C, but it does enable the code to be simplified. By removing the need to put in many free() (or equiv) calls to cleanup state, the "interesting" logic in the code stands out more, not being obscured by cleanup calls and goto jumps. I'm wondering what people think of making use of this in libvirt ? To my mind the only real reason to *not* use it, would be to maintain code portability to non-GCC/non-CLang compilers. OS-X, *BSD and *Linux all use GCC or CLang or both, so its a non-issue there. So the only place this could cause pain is people building libvirt on Win32, who are using the Microsoft compilers instead og GCC.
With distro/maintenance hat on, another -.5 is (potentially) more conflicts when backporting upstream fixes to older branches/releases.
I do prefer the simplified pattern in this proposal, but like others am on the fence.
Regards, Jim -- libvir-list mailing list libvir-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list
