For a while I was wondering why the XS-portion of my on-going String::Ruby was so ugly and wordy. It's now over 60K, with a lot of functions taking five or six argument. A not untypical prototype of such a function looks like:
But then it dawned on me that this is probably not so much my fault but rather has something to do with the difference between C strings and those of Ruby and Perl. Most functions from
/* Returns an array of the fields */
char ** split (
register char *string, int len,
register char *delim, int dlen,
int limit,
int **lens, int *nelems /* length of each field and how many we have */
);
string.h will fail miserably when the strings contain the NULL byte, whereas this is no problem for Perl or Ruby.
Subsequently, for every string I pass to a function I need an additional length parameter. Instead of using the str* family of functions, I have to use mem* instead. This is the reason why I am progressing with the speed of a turtle. Had I thought about this before, I would have created a structure for the string. Too late now.
On the other hand, it's pretty fun. C is still a wonderfully expressive and idiomatic language. It'll also enforce some B&D strategies on the programmer. Not by making silly rules what you may not do but rather by producing segfaults which is much more convincing.
