[LLVMdev] [RFC] Developer Policy for LLVM C API

[Juergen Ributzka]

Wow, this went of topic very quickly ;-)

As you know I am very interested in an stable API (C and/or C++) for LLVM, but maybe we should discuss this in a separate thread. Designing a good stable API from scratch will take some time and until that point I want to document our current “tribal knowledge”. I will post a patch as you suggested.

—Juergen


> On Jul 20, 2015, at 1:08 PM, Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Part (most?) of the point of having a stable API is as a way of decoupling the development processes of two separate projects (modulo well-documented release-to-release updating). Requiring our users to add tests in our tree doesn't really achieve much decoupling.
> 
> I’m not sure there is much “coupling” here. The point is that we expose a C API that is supposed to be stable but is not well tested. And some part of the C API is just a wrapper around the C++ and hasn’t really been designed to be “stable” in time.
> It seems also that we don’t really know what part of the C API really needs to be stable and is important for the users, so I read Pete’s proposal as “let’s collect the current use-cases and make them tests in LLVM, so that we define what is part of the stable C API and so that we won’t (inadvertently) break valid use cases".
> 
> 
> Yeah, this is just terrible though for all of the reasons I raised in my email and as you even say here "And some part of the C API is just a wrapper around the C++ and hasn’t really been designed to be “stable” in time."
>  
> 
> As of having this in-tree or out-of-tree, I’m not sure about that and there is a trade-off.
> 
> 
> I'm regretting ever saying "out of tree" here as I don't think it's the main issue, rather the splitting of the "bindings" style of api that we see a lot of in the C API directory and the more solid ones that we see from libclang and liblto.
> 
> -eric 
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