Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Better type names for int64 RFC

On 23 Aug 2014, at 03:05, Rasmus Lerdorf <[email protected]> wrote:

> The end result here is likely that in order to write a portable
> extension, extension authors will simply do:
> 
> #ifndef IS_LONG
> # define IS_LONG IS_INT
> # define Z_STRLEN Z_STRSIZE
> # define RETURN_LONG RETURN_INT
> # define RETVAL_LONG RETVAL_INT
> # define Z_LVAL Z_IVAL
> ...
> #endif
> 
> and not change a single macro anywhere in the actual code.

That’s a very good point. It’s easy to forget that many people write cross-version compatible extensions.

> That's certainly what I would do. And if the current naming survives we
> should provide a macro_compat.h file with the complete set.

Perhaps we could backport the new types, too, and make them just aliases on older PHP versions?

For example, zend_int would be a long in 5.5 and 5.6, but a 64-bit-on-64-bit type on 7.

> Overall I don't think trying to make the macro names match the
> underlying types exactly is worth the hassle here. Our audience for this
> is extension authors. In most cases the author doesn't necessarily care
> about the subtle differences between calling it IS_LONG and IS_INT and I
> don't think it actually makes it any more clear to a C developer. "int"
> is not a well-defined cross-platform type anymore than a "long" is. So
> we are swapping one set of vague names for another set of vague names.
> I'd much rather see a nice clear README.TYPES or perhaps it is simply
> part of the existing README.PARAMETER_PARSING_API which defines exactly
> what these various macros mean.

+1 to that.

--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/