Please export function-like macros as functions

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#122 opened on Aug 19, 2014 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty: 4/5
Estimated time: 3-5 days
Newbie friendliness: 35/100

Issue type: Feature
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Stale
Tech stack: c, julia
Domain: backend-api-design, bioinformatics

Research direction

Start with the sam_itr_queryi and sam_itr_destroy definitions linked in htslib/sam.h, then inspect how these APIs appear in the shared library. Identify the function-like macros in the requested API area and verify that the completed change exposes equivalent callable functions for Julia and other wrappers without changing their behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

D2: Moderate P3: Low priority

When I tried to write a wrapper of htslib, I found some APIs are not exported as functions and cannot be found in the shared library file. For example, the sam_itr_queryi function is exported as function thus other program can directly call that function via the shared library, but the sam_itr_destroy is actually a function-like macro, whose name is not visible from the outside. Unfortunately, my favorite language (the Julia language) cannot read this kind of macros automatically.

I think that inlining these functions can satisfy my need without imposing performance damage and provide more type-safety. I'd appreciate it if you would replace function-like macros with genuine functions.

Thanks.

Dominant language: C
Stars: 950
Forks: 475
Avg merge: 3d 13h
Merged PRs (30d): 11

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