6 The vast majority of PDCLib is original work by me. I felt it was the only way
7 to ensure that the code was indeed free of third-party rights, and thus free to
8 be released into the Public Domain.
10 Another issue was that of coding style, quality and stability of the code, and
11 the urge to really understand every miniscule part of the code as to be able to
12 maintain it well once v1.0 has been released.
14 That is not to say there are no credits to be given. To the contrary:
16 Paul Edwards (author of the PDPCLIB), for inspirational code fragments, thanks.
18 P.J. Plauger (author of "The Standard C Library"), for a book without which I
19 would not have been able to create PDCLib at this quality, thanks.
21 Paul Bourke (author of mathlib), for allowing me access to a complete math
22 library under public domain terms so I could use it as a reference, thanks.
24 Peter ("Candy") Bindels (netizen of osdev.org), who located a copy of Cody
25 & Waite's "Software Manual for the Elementary Functions" for me and saved me
26 serious cash in the process, thanks.
28 Michael Moody, who contributed the generic implementation for <stdarg.h> to
29 the Public Domain which can now be found in <_PDCLIB_config.h>, thanks.
31 Rod Pemberton, for pointing out several flaws in early versions of PDCLib and
32 giving other valuable hints, thanks.
34 Everyone involved in the first, "public" attempt at PDCLib, for bearing with me
35 when I restarted from scratch, thanks.
37 Everyone bearing with me during the "stdio block", a period of many years in
38 which PDCLib received not a single update because I was stuck and could not
39 find the time and energy to work it out.
41 Lennart Frid�n and Sammy Nordstr�m, who have been great pals even after I sunk
42 some other project that had eaten countless hours of work between the three of
45 My wife, daughter, and son for sharing husband and daddy with this strange
52 I followed a set of guidelines in creating PDCLib. If you find some piece that
53 does not adhere to them, that's a bug worth reporting. I mean it. I am a bit
54 obsessive when it comes to coding style. ;-)
56 - All the stuff that is not part of the standard specification is "hidden" in
57 the _PDCLIB_* namespace - functions, variables, macros, files, directories.
58 This is to make it easier to distinguish between what the standard dictates
59 and what I added to make PDCLib work.
61 - Any internal includes (i.e. those not specified by the standard) have their
62 header guards defined in the *including* file, for a tiny bit of compile-time
65 - I always try to minimize the use of local variables. Wherever possible I used
66 parameters passed by-value directly, and deferred declaration of locals to the
67 innermost block of statements, in hopes that it might reduce memory footprint
68 when the library is compiled with a compiler that is not that great at
71 - Every function, every static data item that could possibly be shared, got its
72 own implementation file. This means the library itself is probably larger than
73 strictly necessary, and might take a couple of clock cycles longer to link,
74 but it reduces size of object files and executables.
76 - Where possible, I tried to share functionality between similar functions (as
77 can be seen in the atoi() and strtol() function families). This means one or
78 two additional function calls, but again reduces memory footprint and eases
79 maintenance of the library.
81 - Function arguments are named exactly as in the standard document.
83 - The standard is taken quite literally in places. For example, the default
84 implementations of memcpy() really copies char-wise. This runs contrary to
85 earlier claims of performance, but is consistent with the *letter* of the
86 standard, and you will probably use your compiler builtins (through a platform
89 - Every file has an Id tag, so that it is on file for *every* code file.
91 - PDCLib code has no bias towards POSIX; indeed the absence of POSIX tidbits is
92 one of its hallmarks. However, PDCLib also has no bias *against* POSIX, and
93 when one platform abstraction is as good as another, I chose the POSIX one for
94 sheer familiarity. (This is mainly referring to naming and parameter lists of
97 - Identifiers are tersely named, but not cryptically abbreviated, and should be
98 intuitive enough to allow easy understanding of PDCLib inner workings.
100 - I disagree with the notion that good code needs no comments. Code tells you
101 *how*, but not the *why*, and you have to figure out the *what* yourself. So
102 I added comments to every nontrivial piece of code explaining my motives and
103 hopefully keeping overly ambitious editors from repeating my mistakes. The
104 header files especially should be self-documenting to the point of being a
105 suitable replacement for any library reference book you might be using.