[dwm] I merged the whole source to one file and wanna let you know the implications

From: Anselm R. Garbe <arg_AT_suckless.org>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:06:32 +0200

I think one can argue a lot about how to organize source code
the right way. Especially if your codebase is huge.

Anyway, I realized that I reorganized the dwm code base a couple
of times, and this has been due to one fact: dwm's code base has
been organized following two different paradigms - separating
code into logically equal parts on one side (client.c, event.c,
screen.c, layout.c, tag.c, ..) and functionally equal parts
(draw.c, main.c, util.c)i on the other side...

Due to this separation often the need arised to enforce
consistency into the one or the other direction. I believe that
also other projects who thought carefully about these questions
noticed the same.

However, I browsed through the old Unix tools several times, and
they often cosist of only a single source file. That's because
they want to meet the goal "do only ONE thing, and do it well".

So organizing dwm in a single dwm.c (see hg tip) will enforce
to reach the ideal much more in my conlusion. There are also
some positive benefits in this decision.

The overhead to differentiate between static and extern
variables/functions is gone now, you can call all functions and
use all global variables within dwm.c. config.h can refer to any
global variable or function now. This includes extending dwm
with different layouts - you only need to write a .c file now
(no need to write a .h file), include that .c file in config.h
right before the Layout-array initialization and it will simply
work.

You can declare all functions static in external layout
implementations, simply because they will be part of dwm.c
anyways after CPP did its job.

I will do the same with dmenu as well.

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe >< http://www.suckless.org/ >< GPG key: 0D73F361
Received on Sun Sep 16 2007 - 13:06:32 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Sun Jul 13 2008 - 14:53:08 UTC