Hi Marc, > Many if not the majority of Gnulib modules provide typedefs for the > public structs they export (*). It just occurred to me that the > (x)string-buffer module does not provide any typedef for its struct > string_buffer. > > Was this an oversight or on purpose?
What would be the benefit? typedefs are usually used to hide implementation details, for example 'u64' may be a struct or an integer type. Or, some libraries define typedef struct foo foo_t[1]; when they want a type that is not copied when passed through a function call. When the API contains a struct type, the programmer knows exactly what happens in function calls and whether to pass a pointer. The only benefit that I see is that the typedef name is usually shorter to write. But that does not matter when, typically, there will be 1 or at most 2 instances of such a struct in a given function. Bruno
