Re: [9fans] Typestr usage (inspired by libgeometry)

[Matthew Veety <mveety@gmail.com>]

On 16/12/2025 10:35 am, sirjofri via 9fans wrote:
> Thinking about how typestr provides pretty cool syntactic sugar, I was wondering why that's the case? Is there a goal to maintain the C standard as far as it makes sense, or is it compatibility between plan 9 systems?

I thinks it's a mix of lack of awareness and the hidden function calls, 
I've used this quite a bit and there are some problems with 
maintainability because it hides what you're doing, though it can make 
code easier to write, especially things like typecasts.

On 16/12/2025 11:17 am, ori@eigenstate.org wrote:
> It's a subtly wrong feature -- it looks cute, but doesn't
> generalize well in C. Finishing it would imply garbage
> collection (or at least destructors), which have their
> own disadvantages.

This was years ago so I'm likely misremembering, but there was someone 
(I think qrstuv?) that added destructors and something like Go's defer 
to the compiler. The destructor didn't add any syntax to the compiler as 
is just would call a function defined similarly to the rest of the 
typestr methods. It worked pretty well for what is was. I don't remember 
how (or if) it handled the hidden allocations needed for intermediate 
values in expressions though.

-- 
Veety

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