[Ardour-Dev] Hello, some tech talk, etc.

[Tim Mayberry]

On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 11:31 PM, Razvan Cojocaru <razvanco at gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>> >> 1) recursive mutexes are not acceptable. google around for decades-old
>> >> criticisms and the story of how they came to be part of pthreads.
>> >
>> > +1 !!
>>
>> OK, so recursive mutexes are off-limits, but gotos are OK. :D
>
>
> goto's as a mean of avoiding multiple exit points from a function without
> creating excessively complex nested conditionals are definitely OK. gotos as
> a means of restarting a loop under odd conditions is not ideal since it can
> normally be done better without them, but sometimes  it just feels right.
>

To me it seems like many of the uses of goto in the ardour source
result from a more "C style" of programming and with a little
refactoring many could be removed if that was a goal.

I had a rough go at it this afternoon and removing about 20 out of the
first 25 or so I encountered in libardour was fairly straight forward:
https://github.com/mojofunk/ardour3-mingw/commits/goto

about 30 less lines of code too.

One other "C style" practice I notice a lot is using an int as a
return type to indicate success(0)/failure(-1) rather than
bool(success=true, failure=false). I find this a little confusing
sometimes when reading through the code being more used to C++ style.

Tim.