Re: argmatch: accept perfect matches in documented arglists

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Paul,

> Le 21 mai 2019 à 18:18, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> a écrit :
> 
> On 5/21/19 12:16 AM, Akim Demaille wrote:
>> I still use static inline, because with static only, GCC complains about 
>> unused functions.  If you have suggestions on the gnulib recommended way of 
>> dealing with this, I'll adjust the code.
> 
> I'm not quite following what you're trying to do there (that's an enormous 
> macro -- can't you do whatever you're doing without macros? :-).

I wish I was not using macros, but argmatch works with any type, of any size.  
So most of the functions must work with types of unknown sizes.  In C++, that's 
a straightforward use case for 'template', but we don't have this option here.

So I guess we have more or less three possibilities

1. use macros to generate structs and functions that depend on the type passed 
as a parameter

2. play repeated #define TYPE foo + #include "generate-the-code.h" to do the 
same thing but without all the slashes

3. try to have single implementation which plays with sizeof, offsetof, etc.

(I don't think m4 is considered an option here ;)

I tried 3, and it really messy.  I never really considered 2, and after 
discussing with Bruno, it appeared that 1 was acceptable.  Instead of one giant 
macros there could be several smaller one and a big one to call them all.  It's 
probably more maintainable, but makes no big difference.


> However, generally speaking static functions in .h files are a bad idea for C 
> code, because a static function defined in a .h file cannot be called 
> directly from an extern inline function defined in user code.

Actually, the macro should probably offer the user the choice to make the 
symbols internal or external.

> To prevent GCC from complaining about the unused functions, you can use a 
> pragma; this should suffice if the static functions are not intended to be 
> called directly from user code. Or you can make the functions extern inline 
> instead of static inline; Gnulib has a bunch of *INLINE* macros for this.

Yes, the user should be free to use any function specifier she wants,
including Gnulib's macros.