[LLVMdev] [RFC] Developer Policy for LLVM C API (original) (raw)

Sean Silva chisophugis at gmail.com
Fri Jul 17 18:03:19 PDT 2015

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Juergen,

I've actually got another, perhaps more radical, plan. Let's just get rid of the C API or move it to another project. This simplifies a lot of the plans here where people have too many different ideas of how the C API should work. At this point the people who want a stable C API per incremental version can do that and handle the overhead of porting themselves and the people that want a C API that just happens to be a C interface can have a wrapper (or SWIG or whatever they want). I realize it's radical, but it seems that there are so many different wants for C API here that solving everyone's problems or wants is going to be impossible.

This might backfire if this results in a much better tested interface between the C++ and C API implementation, such that we will actually get red bots when we "break the C API" and be forced to fix it.

-- Sean Silva

-eric On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 12:39 PM Juergen Ributzka <juergen at apple.com> wrote:

Hi @ll,

a few of us had recently a discussion about how to manage the C API and possible policies regarding addition, maintenance, deprecation, and removal of API. Even thought there is a strong agreement in the community that we shouldn't break released C API and should be backwards compatible, there doesn’t seem to be a developer policy that backs that up. This is something we should fix. I was wondering what the interested parties think of the current approach and what could/should we improve to make the use and maintenance of the C API easier for users and the developers alike. I was hoping we could also introduce a process that allows the removal of an API after it has been deprecated for a whole release and the release notes stated that it will be removed. Thoughts? Comments? Cheers, Juergen

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