Re: [ft-devel] Export services?

[David Turner]

Hi everyone,

"services" are an _implementation_ detail of FreeType 2. They're not
strictly necessary since you could provide the same thing with a lot
of #ifdef in a monolithic engine. I just find them more convenient
to structure the engine.

the "wrapper" functions are here to protect the users of the service's
implementation details. They have various advantages:

- they expose a "clean" API that doesn't depend on internals of
 the font engine. Allowing us to redesign services when needed

- services can be used either internally or to implement a public
 API.

in other words, exposing services publicly has many problems:

- it forces us to expose more internals of the font engine, which
 means less possibilities for improvements in the future. And
 it's not like we've not been burned by this already
 (i.e. FT_OPTIMIZE_MEMORY breaks rogue libraries)

- it forces us to add a way to distinguish between "internal"
 and "public" services.

And I don't see how they could make the engine "more powerful".

Regards,

- David Turner
- The FreeType Project  (www.freetype.org)




Chia-I Wu a écrit :

> Hi,
>
> There are some functions which are wrappers to services.  Then why not
> simply export the services to clients?
>
> The idea is, we let modules decide which services, among those they
> provide, to export.  For a exported service, it should provide headers,
> not depending on internal headers, to describe the interface.  Of course
> error-checking should be done with more care in this case.  To make
> finding a serviou ce faster, we can use integers as service id, instead of
> strings.
>
> These are what I can think of now.  Surely there are more things we
> should pay attention to when exporting services, but it also means
> freetype can get more powerful.
>
>  
services are an _implementation_ detail of FreeType 2, yand masking them 
from the user
is a good thing, because it allows us to