[Lldb-commits] [PATCH] Implements a HostThread class.

[Jean-Daniel Dupas]

My 2 cents, wouldn't it be possible to combine the best of both world: having a formal protocol definition, and avoiding cast by using typedef ?

class HostThreadProtocol  {
virtual required_method() = 0;
}

class WindowsThread : public HostThreadProtocol {
// Window implementation
}

class OSXThread : public HostThreadProtocol {
// OS X implementation
}

And then; 
typedef WindowsThread HostThread;
or
typedef OSXThread HostThread;


Then, is someone want to implements Thread for a new host, it know exactly what it has to implements, and we don't have to cast to specific class when needed.

The drawback I see is that you can accidentally call a specific method in generic code, but the buildbot should catch that.

Jean-Daniel

Le 29 août 2014 à 07:14, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> a écrit :

> And FWIW, I have a patch locally which actually replaces all lldb::thread_t's with HostThreads.  No pre-processor definitions crept in.  ThreadJoin, Launch, and SetThreadName made up more than 95% of the conversions, and those are all part of the common interface.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 10:05 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 9:42 PM, Jason Molenda <jmolenda at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> To take one small example, HostInfo::GetOSBuildString is defined for three out of the four platforms.  And so any generic code that might want to call this has to do
> 
>     if (IsHost())
> #if !defined(__linux__)
>         return HostInfo::GetOSBuildString(s);
> #else
>         return false;
> #endif
>  
> But "os build string" and "os kernel version" are platform specific, by definition.  I find it really hard to agree that we should just allow any old platform specific method to be exposed through a supposedly generic interface with different subsets of methods broken on different subsets of platforms.  Then, you write some code to call a method like like HostInfo::GetRedApples(), and you have no idea under what situations it's even going to work.  If a method isn't supported on your platform, you shouldn't be trying to call it.  If you are, that's already a good indicator that you might have a layering problem.
>  
> 
> A call into *any* HostInfo method may similarly need to be #ifdef protected.  And while it looks fine, to have #if !defined linux here, we know that eventually someone will add a method that only makes sense on Mac OS X (or so they think) and they'll do
> 
> #if defined (__APPLE__)
>   return HostInfo::GetRedApples();
> #endif
> 
> And then Solaris 16 will be released and suddenly it can get red apples too - a maintainer of the HostInfoSolaris class adds that method but then has to go find all the ifdef blocks and make them defined __APPLE__ || __SOLARIS__. 
> 
> 
> I think we need a consistent error return API for functions in HostInfo/HostThread to say "not available on this platform" and generic code can use a different approach.
> Not all methods even return Error.  And the cost of making every single method return Error is even higher, because nobody is ever going to check for this return value.  And what do you do when you do get the return value?  Call exit()? If the compiler catches this for you it doesn't have to be a runtime decision.
> 
> Again, the number of places where this is going to happen are small.  As Jim said, most generic LLDB code isn't and shouldn't be calling into Host.  You can search through my HostInfo patch, for example, and find that I converted maybe 100 pre-processor definitions into about 2 or 3.  I don't think this problem of #ifdef'ing will be as bad as you think it will be, and certainly it's better than before?
> 
>  HostInfo has another issue, btw, which is that it is a static class.  So there's really no other way.  There's no instance of it, just as there was no instance of Host.  I could have gone and added methods for Windows jobs, SEH, and plenty of other highly windows specific concepts to Host.h and grew the class even more than it already was, and then stubbed out all the methods on every other platform, but is that really what you want?  More likely to break the build, increases code size, increases build time, all for code that is never going to run on the platform.  And since, by definition, the code should never run on the platform, why not find out at compile time if some code path calls it?
> 
> The idea of "I'll just implement this method for my platform and stub it out for everyone else" just shifts the burden from a compile time burden to a run-time burden, which is almost always a worse proposition to have to deal with.  In the end, the "public" interface of any given Host class is likely to stabilize and change very infrequently.  The platform specific bits, on the other hand, are likely to evolve quite regularly.  A design where people can work on the platform specific bits in isolation from every other platform without affecting anyone else is a huge win across the board.
> 
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