Re: Questioning non-NULL boxed types

[Joshua N Pritikin <vishnu pobox com>]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 11:07:14AM +0200, Tim Janik wrote:
> this behaviour was implemented for GString and GValueArray mostly as a test
> case for value initializers. i'm now questioning whether we want to keep
> that behaviour, the drawbacks/pros i see are:
> 
> - not allowing NULL is slightly inefficient in setups like:
>   g_value_init (&value, G_TYPE_GSTRING);
>   g_value_set_boxed (&value, my_gstring);
>   since an intermediate 0-length GString is created at g_value_init() time
> - for languages that suppot NULL strings/arrays etc, this behaviour implies
>   information loss, since a NULL GString != 0length GString, same for
>   GValueArray
> + LBs that can't handle NULL strings or arrays don't need to put additional
>   logic into their glue code
> + LBs that can't handle NULL strings or arrays don't loose information over
>   the C API if NULL is not a representable string/array in GValue

i'm not involved with the perl-gtk interface, but i have plenty of experience
interfacing perl with C libraries.  The main thing that i want when looking
at an API is detailed control, which should turn into efficiency.  i don't
care much about the complexity of the API (within reason!  PerlQt pushes
the limits ;-).  i expect torture, because i know that my job is to hide
the messy details.

i vote for maximum efficiency.  $0.02  (i'm not doing the implementation
so discount by opinion appropriately. ;-)

> of course this all assumes that there are LBs out there that have problems
> representing NULL strings/arrays, so reports thereof would help in making
> the final decision over this, e.g. perl wouldn't be an issue as it could
> map things as:
> 
> my $mystring = "n-length string";
> my $mystring = ""; # 0-length string
> undef $mystring;   # NULL-string
> 
> i'm not so sure about arrays (i'm pretty perl illiterate ;)

Perl doesn't have NULL arrays, but i bet undef can work for NULL arrays just
as well as scalars.  Perl is very flexible with types.

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