[petsc-dev] Symbol visibility

[Jed Brown]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 19:53, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> Worse comes to worse I put it back (but better next time :-).
>

Apparently this can done purely with headers (no need to touch all the
source files) and (uglier in my opinion, but still possible) with a pragma
to push and pop the visibility state (C99 at least has _Pragma, it's dirtier
to need #pragma (of course wrapped based on a configure test)).  This makes
it a much simpler issue to "put back, but better" if needed.


>  Actually I think handling these "things" with CPP is not the way to go, in
> fact, I'd like to see, if possible, almost no use of CPP in PETSc source.
> Reason: PETSc source code currently is the combination of two relatively
> simple but very different, languages CPP and C. Doing source to source
> manipulations on this beast is a nightmare because one cannot even parse CPP
> plus C. If we eliminate the CPP then it becomes only C which we parse and
> manipulate relatively easily, this opens up enormous opportunities for a
> whole new approach to code development we do not have currently and cannot
> have with a CPP plus C code base. Of course, I could be totally on the wrong
> track but I won't know without investigation.
>

Clang/LLVM can parse the C with everything in it, then give you the AST or
whatever intermediate form you like.

 Honestly I am sick of having this big code base where making changes means
> editing flat files and manually changing source code, I thinking that model
> really needs to change. I don't really know how to change the model but I
> really want to see if change and if that involves going down some wrong
> roads that is ok with me, better than not trying things.
>

Sounds like you should switch to Smalltalk.

Jed
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