Re: Make loadable extension library

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2015-10-29 at 19:02 +0000, Tim Murphy wrote:
> 1) The return value must be allocated by the function, after which
> make copies it into a buffer and deallocates it. [...] It seems as if
> it would be much better to expose GNU make's variable buffer interface
> and cut out the extra memory allocations

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you have in mind, but you have to
be careful to avoid the "all the world's a POSIX ELF format" syndrome.
In some systems shared libraries cannot free memory allocated in other
dynamic objects.  For example in Windows make shouldn't allocate memory
and leave a DLL responsible for freeing it (or vice versa).

Given that restriction I'm fine with improving the interface.

> 2) There are some functions for seeking tokens in a string that should
> also be exposed - to help functions process lists.

I agree, although there are too many existing interfaces in make today
that parse tokens.  I've wanted to try to wrangle them into some
semblance of order before I try exporting them.