[gmx-developers] Future developments

[Mark Abraham]

David van der Spoel wrote:
> Erik Lindahl wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Feb 24, 2009, at 1:35 PM, David van der Spoel wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> yesterday I put a question on the developer list on where to put a 
>>> new mini-library for statistics. Right now it is used only from the 
>>> analysis tools but it might also be used from other parts of the 
>>> code. Hence I suggested placement in gmxlib, or even directly in src. 
>>> If no one object I will do this later today.
>>>
>>> More in general, we should decide on the future structure of the 
>>> source tree, do we want a src directory with dozens of 
>>> subdirectories, or should it be hierarchical. Do we move to one 
>>> library or do we keep four different ones?
>> Long-term I'd say we want one library, but with proper namespaces :-)
> 
> What does that mean in C?

Nothing good :-)

You can simulate it by requiring prefixes to function and/or variable 
names, so kernel__mdrunner(), but you need some convention to keep clear 
what bit is the namespace name and what is the function name.

You can also declare a struct full of pointers to functions which are 
only defined statically, so that you'd have to call kernel.mdrunner(). 
The kernel function arrays are essentially doing this already :-) The 
approach comes with the upside of being partially object-oriented.

Mark