[geos-devel] RFC 9: Restore C++ API as public API

[Andrew Bell]

On Fri, May 17, 2019, 7:56 AM Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebastic at xs4all.nl>
wrote:

> On 5/17/19 2:21 PM, Andrew Bell wrote:
>
> > Are you not rebuilding packages?
>
> Obviously we are. And that's the problem, new GEOS releases tend to
> cause build failures for the projects that rely on the C++ API.
>
> Everything that relies on the stable C API doesn't need to be rebuilt
> for new GEOS releases.
>

This implies that "stable" is the
important bit. This is, IMO, a design issue, rather than one of a language
choice, generally speaking.

For people writing C++ there is real value in a stable and well-designed
C++ library interface that simplifies development and potentially reduces
bugs. This is an important consideration. For example, dealing with memory
ownership for some C libraries can be trouble and can make for convoluted
code.

Frequent, breaking API changes seem a problem. ABI changes seem more like a
small annoyance. I can understand how a stable ABI would be nice, but I
personally don't think it's more important than a good interface for
library users.

> On Fri, May 17, 2019, 6:30 AM Sebastiaan Couwenberg <sebastic at xs4all.nl>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> On 5/17/19 1:14 PM, Andrew Bell wrote:
> >>> Why is this? There are many libraries that have C++ interfaces.
> >>
> >> Which also have difficulty providing a stable ABI. One that doesn't
> >> change the symbols it exports with the new compiler releases, etc.
> >>
> >> Having a stable C ABI is a major plus for any project that uses C++ in
> >> its codebase, it makes transitions to new releases much easier. A core
> >> library like GEOS have many projects that require it, some are actively
> >> maintained and implement changes quicky, others don't. And these make
> >> life suck for distributions where all the projects need to be integrated
> >> to work with the same version of GEOS.
> >>
> >>> On Thu, May 16, 2019, 11:37 PM Sebastiaan Couwenberg <
> sebastic at xs4all.nl
> >>>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> On 5/16/19 11:28 PM, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
> >>>>> I'd like propose to effectively revert the RFC 6:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> https://trac.osgeo.org/geos/wiki/RFC9
> >>>>
> >>>> Please don't. We'll get more projects like OSSIM that break with new
> >>>> GEOS releases, this causes significant delays before the new release
> can
> >>>> be included in distributions where lots of projects depend on GEOS
> >>>> (which all need to build with the new release).
> >>
> >> Kind Regards,
> >>
> >> Bas
> >>
> >> --
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> >
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