Generic (void *)int

[Maurizio Cimadamore]

On 18/02/2019 11:45, Mark Raynsford wrote:
> Most OpenGL bindings such as JOGL and
> LWJGL actually expose both pointer-typed and a long-typed overloads of
> glVertexAttribPointer and friends for this reason. Maybe something more
> along those lines would be satisfactory for these edge cases?

I think you hit the nail on the head - this is, ultimately, what we call 
a 'civilization' layer problem.

Every API will have some domain-specific knowlegde of the pointers being 
passed around - in some cases these could be strings (which we'd like to 
pass around as plain Java strings), in other case (such as this) just 
numbers, offsets - in which case what you really want is the client to 
be able to pass just a number (not a pointer).

Currently the only way to civilize in this manner is to write a new 
header which includes the main header, and add the extra civilized API 
points - whose implementation will just call the main, pointer-based, ones.

This will work well in this case, but of course requires generating a 
shared library wrapper - which increases the maintenance cost - so it is 
a tradeoff.

Longer term, some kind of jextract plugin/API will significantly 
simplify such tasks.

Maurizio