Re: [AD] Export AL_VECTOR

[Elias Pschernig <elias@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2008-06-18 at 18:26 -0600, Trent Gamblin wrote:
> On Wed, June 18, 2008 5:15 pm, Thomas Fjellstrom said:
> > I would like to see AL_VECTOR be a public Allegro 5 api.
> 
> I personally think that would be great. Any program I make uses
> vectors and if I'm sticking to C then I wouldn't have to write my
> own. Also I think in the case of the fshooks api it would make
> things nicer.
> 
> Off-topic but I'd also like to see the threading stuff made public.
> I think we briefly discussed this on a HackDay but no decision was
> made. There were people on both sides of the fence on this as I'm
> sure there will be with the vector api.
> 

I'm all for making the threading API public, I forgot whether we ever
agreed for or against it. One argument I remember against it is that
pthreads supposedly is portable enough. An argument for it for me is
that it really fits into what Allegro is, as it's a core part of any
somewhat bigger game. E.g. both SDL and GLFW have a threading API for
that reason.

With AL_VECTOR, I'm less sure, I'm somewhat afraid we'll end up with
something similar to glib. Like, myself, I also use vectors, dynamic
strings, hashes, and some other stuff in about every C program - but I'm
not sure that's a good reason to add them to Allegro. Even with just
AL_VECTOR, the next question would be what API to give it, like should
it support sorting, should we add helper functions for use as a stack,
for use as a heap queue.. just opens endless possibilities. But I didn't
look yet where specifically in the fshooks API users would need to deal
with AL_VECTORs, maybe it really is the best way..

-- 
Elias Pschernig <elias@xxxxxxxxxx>