[Qemu-devel] Proposal for amending TCG interface naming scheme

[Aleksandar Markovic]

Hello, all.

I noticed certain barrier and difficulties wrt learning TCG interface by 
newcomers and to some extent oldcomers too. At least some of them can be 
attributed to not best choice of names for functions TCG exposes, especially in 
the area of extract and sextract. I have a quick idea on how to improve it 
using the following renaming scheme:

tcg_gen_extract_i32
tcg_gen_extract_i64
tcg_gen_extract_tl
tcg_gen_sextract_i32
tcg_gen_sextract_i64
tcg_gen_sextract_tl
tcg_gen_extract2_i32
tcg_gen_extract2_i64
tcg_gen_extract2_tl
tcg_gen_extrl_i64_i32
tcg_gen_extrh_i64_i32
tcg_gen_ext_i32_i64
tcg_gen_extu_i32_i64

could become:

tcg_gen_select_i32
tcg_gen_select_i64
tcg_gen_select_tl
tcg_gen_select_s_i32
tcg_gen_select_s_i64
tcg_gen_select_s_tl
tcg_gen_gather_i32
tcg_gen_gather_i64
tcg_gen_gather_tl
tcg_gen_extract_l_i64_i32
tcg_gen_extract_h_i64_i32
tcg_gen_extend_s_i32_i64
tcg_gen_extend_0_i32_i64

The idea is to provide significant "lexicographic" distance between those 
groups of functions, rather than having the similar name (wiht common root 
"ext) for all of them.

What do you think?

Sincerely,
Aleksandar