629768 - ANI: opaque API for String, Namespace, etc (if necessary)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tamarin Graveyard :: Virtual Machine, defect)

Description

[Steven Johnson]

The existing APIs for String and Namespace (and probably a few other things) are reasonably well-encapsulated; do we need to wrap an abstraction layer around them, or can we just expose them as-is? (I'm tempted to add "for now, anyway", but we'd prefer to be able to implement ANI in a single pass, so if we don't do it now, it will probably never happen.)

Comment 1

[Lars T Hansen]

I vote for "no encapsulation".

Comment 2

[Edwin Smith]

ditto

Comment 3

[Tommy Reilly]

String is pretty entrenched but do we need to expose Namespace?   Maybe the API should be purely in terms of Strings and Multinames?    A cursory glance at player glue show's Namespaces being used a bunch in the debugger (could be moved into VM?) and otherwise its just a bunch of findPublicNamespace and getAnyPublicNamespace calls that probably could be hidden from the glue layer.

Comment 4

[Tommy Reilly]

This might be a good time to discuss the value of the Stringp typedef.   We want ANI to use GCRef<String> and GCMember<String> I think.  Ie move typedef into the "internal" bucket and don't expose it.

Comment 5

[Steven Johnson]

The value of Stringp is negative at this point, it needs to be nuked from orbit.

Comment 6

[Steven Johnson]

The main reason to figure this out is that we probably only get one shot at this in the near-term future... if we go further down this road and wish we added encapsulation, well, tough. That said, I'm inclined to agree about String. I think Tommy's idea is worth investigating, though, if we can limit glue code to String+EncapsulatedMultiname it could simplify things a bit, I'll examine that and see how it looks.

Comment 7

[Rick Reitmaier]

Its worth double-checking the current interface (assuming we haven't done so already) to ensure that we don't 'leak' anything undesirable.

Comment 8

[Tommy Reilly]

I think its pretty clear the ANI interface will expose String