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> Many C programs do not use hierarchical names like `A_B_C` as they ideally should. They instead pick a short identifier that is (often incorrectly) believed t

> Many C programs do not use hierarchical names like `A_B_C` as they ideally should. They instead pick a short identifier that is (often incorrectly) believed to be distinct enough. What is your list of name clashes that you experienced? How many real headaches did they give you? Or is it all a non-problem? Not a rhetorical question - I'm mostly working on smaller projects < 100KLOC. > I don't know how you feel about ctags. I use ctags from time to time when I have to, but I still don't like it when there are multiple namespaces that contain the same set of names which confuses navigation operations, even vim with ctags I think. Maybe even IDEs like Visual Studio, I'd have to check though what works and what doesn't.

lifthrasiir 4y ago
> What is your list of name clashes that you experienced? How much real headaches did they give you? Or is it all a non-problem? Not a rhetorical question - I'm mostly working on smaller projects < 100KLOC. I too refrained from using C for that large software so I don't have many examples either, but in one case I was using TweetNaCl where you have to supply `extern void randombytes(unsigned char*, unsigned long long)` for CSPRNG and I had to rename it for some reason I can no longer recall.
rwmj 4y ago
I've programmed C for 35 years, and namespaces clashes have happened for me exactly once. There are two JSON libraries that use json_* as a prefix and have conflicting symbols. This actually caused a quite difficult to track down bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2001062 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2001062 However this is not a reason to add namespaces. (In fact the bug was fixed using symbol versioning, an already existing feature of ELF.)
Morpholemew 4y ago
> What is your list of name clashes that you experienced? How many real headaches did they give you? Here are a dozen examples from Xlib, where Windows happened to choose the same short common names for many things: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xorgproto/-/blob/master/include/X11/Xwindows.h https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xorgproto/-/blob/m... ... and IIRC this list is no longer sufficient; you need to add to it in order to compile with the current Windows SDK. (Upon closer inspection, it was updated two weeks ago, so maybe it's fine... until the next Windows SDK update.) I'll admit that this happens less often on Linux, where the system headers are smaller (and everybody uses X11 so there's historic reason to avoid all the short names that were gobbled up by Xlib in the '80s), but I've still run into occasional clashes between different library headers, or between legacy code and updated headers. eg. bool/Bool/BOOL are common collisions among pre-C99 libraries (including libraries that require C99 but don't remove the old names for backwards compatibility reasons), as well as min/MIN/max/MAX which still aren't in standard C as far as I can tell. The headaches it gives are real, but not large in the grand scheme of things. The lack of defer (or otherwise standardized and cross-platform __attribute__(cleanup) ) is a bigger headache, for example.
forrestthewoods 4y ago
> What is your list of name clashes that you experienced? My experience is that sharing libraries is so wildly difficult In both C and C++ that code is not shared and wheels are reinvented. This has more to do with build systems than namespaces. But namespaces are a factor.

lifthrasiir 4y ago

> What is your list of name clashes that you experienced? How much real headaches did they give you? Or is it all a non-problem? Not a rhetorical question - I'm mostly working on smaller projects < 100KLOC. I too refrained from using C for that large software so I don't have many examples either, but in one case I was using TweetNaCl where you have to supply `extern void randombytes(unsigned char*, unsigned long long)` for CSPRNG and I had to rename it for some reason I can no longer recall.

rwmj 4y ago

I've programmed C for 35 years, and namespaces clashes have happened for me exactly once. There are two JSON libraries that use json_* as a prefix and have conflicting symbols. This actually caused a quite difficult to track down bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2001062 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2001062 However this is not a reason to add namespaces. (In fact the bug was fixed using symbol versioning, an already existing feature of ELF.)

Morpholemew 4y ago

> What is your list of name clashes that you experienced? How many real headaches did they give you? Here are a dozen examples from Xlib, where Windows happened to choose the same short common names for many things: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xorgproto/-/blob/master/include/X11/Xwindows.h https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/proto/xorgproto/-/blob/m... ... and IIRC this list is no longer sufficient; you need to add to it in order to compile with the current Windows SDK. (Upon closer inspection, it was updated two weeks ago, so maybe it's fine... until the next Windows SDK update.) I'll admit that this happens less often on Linux, where the system headers are smaller (and everybody uses X11 so there's historic reason to avoid all the short names that were gobbled up by Xlib in the '80s), but I've still run into occasional clashes between different library headers, or between legacy code and updated headers. eg. bool/Bool/BOOL are common collisions among pre-C99 libraries (including libraries that require C99 but don't remove the old names for backwards compatibility reasons), as well as min/MIN/max/MAX which still aren't in standard C as far as I can tell. The headaches it gives are real, but not large in the grand scheme of things. The lack of defer (or otherwise standardized and cross-platform __attribute__(cleanup) ) is a bigger headache, for example.

forrestthewoods 4y ago

> What is your list of name clashes that you experienced? My experience is that sharing libraries is so wildly difficult In both C and C++ that code is not shared and wheels are reinvented. This has more to do with build systems than namespaces. But namespaces are a factor.