Platform-specific config

January 13, 2016

I recently came across this blog article titled Stop writing code that will break on Python 4!. Although the title mentions python 4 it is really discussing “any future major version“.

This is something we have learnt to deal with in LCFG over the years. We often have to tweak configuration slightly when developing support for new platforms and this results in lots of if/elseif/else statements based on the target platform. Once you’ve been through the platform upgrade cycle a few times you learn that the most efficient approach is to special-case the old platform and make the new platform the default. By assuming that the configuration required for the new platform will be the default going forwards (i.e. it sits in the “else” branch) you make the configuration for N+1 and also handle N+M at the same time.


Writing modern C

January 10, 2016

For the v4 LCFG client project I’ve been writing lots of C. To get my C knowledge up to scratch I’ve been consulting many books of varying vintages which leads to quite a mixture of coding styles. I’m quite keen to create code which is concerned “good” according to modern coding standards but I also want to ensure it will compile on a wide range of Unix-like systems, that seems to mean right now that the standard to aim for is C99. I recently came across an interesting article titled "How to C (as of 2016)" which gives a good summary of many important topics to consider. I’ve already been following many of the suggestions but there are also quite a few which are totally new to me. I’m not sure I agree with all of them (e.g. not using char) but I shall definitely be applying some of them.