Unix FD Passing

[Alp Toker]

2009/5/4 Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk>:
> On Mon, 04 May 2009 at 19:44:41 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> On Mon, 04.05.09 16:53, Alp Toker (alp at atoker.com) wrote:
>> > Thanks for paying attention to this. ndesk-dbus is actively using 'f'
>> > for 32 bit single precision floating point values and dbus-java and
>> > dbus-python support it as well now to some extent too I believe.
>>
>> Uh. Could you please post this upstream to the spec, then? If it's
>> that well accepted then this should really be added to the spec!
>

> (If I remember correctly, ndesk-dbus used to #ifdef its float32 extension,
> off by default?)

Right. It was switched on in this commit:
http://git.ndesk.org/?p=dbus-sharp;a=commitdiff;h=b1c825c92f83e43365c5aca83a11d973621a4dbc

The idea behind this was never really performance, but rather that
with the one addition it's possible to map all primitive value types
(in the CLR, and presumably other type systems) directly to D-Bus and
back, which seems a worthwhile cause. Nowadays the optimisations are
enabled to blit arrays of structures right off the wire into managed
memory when the layouts, endian and padding are guaranteed to match in
addition to blittable arrays. If I remember correctly, I was
experimenting with OpenGL over D-Bus at the time and there were some
largish float arrays in the test case. But worthwhile is in the eye of
the beholder :-)

Lennart makes a good point -- I do think it's time to get this into
the spec, and it is out there in live code. Will look into it. Point
taken in being more proactive about specifying proto changes.

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