a2c v4 released
Paul Hoffman
is a significant improvement on earlier versions.
For those of you who are writing programs using the a2c runtime, this
is a significant change that will require re-writing many of your
calls to runtime routines. In short, routines that previously had an
argument including a pointer to a descriptor now have a different
name, and the descriptor argument is gone. This is all described in
the README, as usual.
We have also worked hard to make the emitted C code, and the code you
write for your programs, cleaner. We now use the "-pedantic" flag in
gcc both for the runtime and for the sample code, and all of it now
compiles with no warnings.
Due to other commitments, this will be the last version for at least
two weeks. We're pretty confident that it is quite usable as it is. We
are shooting for having simple validation of field contents in v5. We
also hope you spend the next few weeks letting us know what else we
need to clean up in the code.
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Changes Between a2c Version 3 and Version 4
Compiler Changes
- Made the output of the .h files use C90 comments [PH]
- Handled exception syntax for SEQUENCE [JLS]
- No longer using path information for #defines in .h file [JLS]
- Made the default action to not emit anonymous unions [JLS]
- Emit typed functions for basic operations; this changed lots
of the runtime calls but makes them more robust [JLS]
Runtime Changes
- Correct encoding for tagged type combinations [JLS]
- Correct cases where count of bytes was being returned to
A2C_ERROR_Success [JLS]
- Cleaned up more gcc warnings as reported in Issue #5 [JLS]
- A2C_Print no longer null terminates the buffer [JLS]
- Issue #9 - put _RELATION_decode in .h file [JLS]
- Issue #8 - ifdef MIN [JLS]
Compiler Feature Additions
- Added UseFunction command [JLS]
- Implemented required changes for the validate function [JLS]
- Added flag -anonymous-union [JLS]
- Added flag -inline [JLS]
Runtime Feature Addtions
- Implemented basic validation function code - Not for public use [JLS]
- Added new function A2C_GetStringFromStream [JLS]
Other
- Made the program1.c file use C90 comments; copied to README [PH]
- Corrected test/makefile for Windows environments [PH]
- Added "all" to test/makefile [PH]
- Updated program-1.c and program-everything for the new typed
functions. [PH]
- Removed some examples from the README, but pointed readers to
the real code in test/program-everything.c [PH]