Re: Lock module improvement

[Yoann Vandoorselaere]

Le mercredi 30 juillet 2008 à 00:00 +0200, Bruno Haible a écrit :
> Yoann Vandoorselaere wrote:
> > Additionally, your current lock.h code still make use of abort() which
> > I'm reluctant to see in library code. Would you agree to propagate the
> > error return in case of problem?
> 
> We started to discuss this already in the thread starting at
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-12/msg00002.html
> You pointed out that e.g. pthread_mutex_lock() can fail for various reasons.
> I agree that in theory it could be nice if the applications can "handle" it.
> But there are not many possible ways to "handle" such situations, And if
> you expect a programmer to write
> 
>    assert (pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex) == 0);
> 
> instead of
> 
>    gl_thread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
> 
> I bet that most of them will drop the error checking out of laziness - like
> so many people ignore the return value of 'printf' and 'fprintf'.
> 
> It's a tradeoff between ease-of-use of the macros and theoretical correctness.
> 
> Can you propose a reasonable compromise? (Just changing the existing macros
> to return a value instead of checking the return value is not good, because
> it would make all existing code that uses the macros less reliable.)

Move the macro code into inline function, use the macro to call the
appropriate function. The function return the error, the macro abort()
in case an error is returned. 

-- 
Yoann Vandoorselaere <address@hidden>