Re: [PATCH] mask ADT: new mask.h file [2/22]

Nick Piggin
2004-04-06T06:55:24Z

Rusty Russell wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-06 at 16:06, Paul Jackson wrote:
>
>>>You'll have covered about 300 of them. I don't think a complete
>>>abstraction is actually required or desirable:
>>
>>I suspect we've hit on our first area of actual disagreement here.
>>
>>You observe that providing inline wrappers for the 5 most commonly
>>used cpumask macros would cover 300 of the 420 uses. The other 23
>>or so macros are less commonly used. Sounds about right ...
>>
>>I prefer to provide all 28 macros. I don't see a cost, but do see
>>a gain.
>
>
> Because I believe one should *always* resist the urge to write
> infrastructure. Wait until the users of your functionality gather out
> the front of your house with torches because they're all sick of the
> burden of using existing infrastructure.
>
> Really.
>
> I don't even want to learn 28 bitops primitives. I certainly don't want
> to learn 28 nodemask and 28 cpumask primitives.
>

If they are all equivalent operations, it is a lot saner
than having some "common" half ot the API available to
your abstract type, isn't it?

Surely it would have to be all or nothing...