[pdf-devel] Binary compatibility

[Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente]

Hi,

There is an issue that has not been mentione till now in the discussions
on the mailing list, but probably you already have some ideas in this
matter already.

How are we going to address the binary-compatibility issue? I think that
this kind of library must be binary-compatible along wide version ranges
to ease distribution maintainers and third-party client developer's life.

The problem is that as all structures are defined in the public header
files, we can't assure that the compiler will generate binary compatible
code or that the library clients will make a binary-compatible use of
it. So I suggest leaving a forward-declaration of the structures in the
header files and giving its definition in the .c files. As we already
have accessors for all public members and there is no need for direct
access to the structure, and objects are heap-allocated, this task
should be trivial. Obviously, we cannot apply this in stack-allocated
objects, but anyway those are usually performance-critical ones that are
quite simple and we can assure that "they will never ever be modified".

What do you think about this?

JP