alt Hacker NewsI'm currently working on my own Zig project (an interpreter) and right now I'm working on designing a C interface for it. Seeing things mentioned like having objects as opaque handles, or enum-keyed getters and setters, made me think about how clunky my current API is, since I leak too many details to callers.
What really caught my attention was this: "So from the start, I took inspiration from C libraries I enjoyed working with and designed the API to have a strong, stable ABI that allows for future additions." What are good examples of this? I feel like I just don't have enough experience with well-designed C libraries to know what to look for.
Replies
take a look at hpy, which is explicitly designing a better API for python C extensions. https://hpyproject.org/
One example that comes to my mind is libopus: https://github.com/xiph/opus
If you have structs that might need to be extended, you can use "versioned structs". One popular technique is to include the struct size as the first field. The struct size is set to `offsetof(mystruct, lastmember) + sizeof(lastmember)` and the receiver of the struct can use this to check if a member exists. The ARA API is a good example: https://github.com/Celemony/ARA_API/blob/65ec5c43b943a48cb54...