[Openal-devel] FreeALUT stream proof-of-concept

[Chris Robinson]

On Sunday 08 June 2008 03:27:16 pm Sherief N. Farouk wrote:
> Regarding the line:
> stream = alutCreateStreamFromFile(argv[1], 8192, 4);
>
> Why not have that functionality in the constructor? The current way seems a
> bit too attached to C heritage.

Because the actual implementation declaration is never exported from the lib 
(and currently, isn't even declared outside of the file it's in). Don't 
forget, ALUTStream (which really should be ALUTstream to better match AL 
type-naming) is a virtual interface with no implementation. The actual 
implementation is a StreamImpl object, but the app uses it through the base 
ALUTstream type. An app can't explicitly new an ALUTstream object because it 
has pure virtuals (the compiler will throw an error).

> How about: 
>
> stream = new alut::Stream(argv[1], 8192, 4);

Hmm. The main issue there would be overriding new just for that type. Is it 
possible to make 'new alut::stream(a,b,c)' transparently 
call 'alutCreateStreamFromFile(a,b,c)'? I've never played around with 
overriding new before.

> Minor point: I vote for all lower-case class names (alut::stream VS
> Stream), ala STL. C++ aimed to make user-created types and native types on
> a similar ground, and most C++ de-facto libraries (Boost, for one) use that
> convention.

For C, I think it should be ALUTstream so it better matches AL's type-naming 
(ALuint, ALboolean, etc). Though with a C++ alut namespace, I don't have an 
issue with alut::stream being a mirror of ALUTstream (though it must be 
possible that an ALUTstream* and a alut::stream* be interchangeable).