<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Wow, this went of topic very quickly ;-)<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">—Juergen</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jul 20, 2015, at 1:08 PM, Eric Christopher <<a href="mailto:echristo@gmail.com" class="">echristo@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word" class=""><div class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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. </div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div><div style="word-wrap:break-word" class=""><div class=""><div class="">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.</div><div class="">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".</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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."</div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div style="word-wrap:break-word" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">As of having this in-tree or out-of-tree, I’m not sure about that and there is a trade-off.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">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.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">-eric </div></div></div>
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