Re: gettext patches for cygwin #4: accessing fields of exported structs/arrays

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Charles Wilson wrote on Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 11:54:54AM CET:
> 
> But this assumes that you would do so: IMO indirect access functions are 
> not an eyesore; in fact, exposing variables from a shared library is a 
> flaw from a data-encapsulation POV.

Amen!  <insert your preferred (non)religious way to utter agreement>

It's a pain for software porting (be it to w32 or AIX or *gasp* VMS),
it's a pain for data structuring (oh, an rbtree would've been better),
it's a pain for extensibility (adding an element to the arrayed struct),
it's a pain for thread-safety (that would've been nice with __thread),
and it's almost never excusable by performance arguments (provide a set
of interfaces instead which loops over a number of arguments if your
function is too fast).  Whenever you have the chance, kill a data object
interface.

Cheers,
Ralf, from the lessons painfully learned with libtool department