[PATCH V2] wayland.xml: add "enum", "bitfield" and "is_bitfield" attributes

[Boyan Ding]

On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 11:27 -0700, Jason Ekstrand wrote:

> I'm a little unsure.  I think trying to completely solve this problem
> in a way that will truly make strongly typed languages happy is
> insanity.  That said, I'm cautiously ok with defining bitfields and
> enums as long as we are very careful in scoping what "bitfield" and
> "enum" mean.  A "bitfield" should have only power of two values and
> the result should always be interpreted as an OR of those values.  An
> enum should have every possible value enumerated.  If anyone has a
> good example of something that validly doesn't fit into either of
> these, please speak up.
> 
> The example of wl_output.transform is an enum because every
> possibility is enumerated.  From C or a similar language, you can do
> fun stuff like "if (transform & WL_OUTPUT_TRANSFORM_FLIPPED)" to
> determine if there is a flip.  In a strongly typed language, you can't
> do this and we shouldn't bend over backwards to make it possible.  If
> we try and come up with some convoluted system that makes this
> possible with typed languages, we're going to cause far more pain than
> it's worth.
> 
> 
> One other thing that we need to keep in mind here is the primary
> target audience of Wayland and its libraries.  That audience is
> compositors and toolkits.  Most of those are written in C and C++.
> What we don't want to do is to do a bunch of things for the sake of 1%
> of the target audience that makes the rest have to bend over
> backwards.  When I said "cautiously OK", I mean that I don't see that
> happening yet and I don't see a valid use for an enum that doesn't
> follow one of those two rules.  However, if we have a plausible case
> where doing so would make everyone's lives easier, I'm going to not be
> a big fan.
> 
> 
> Please note that I'm not trying to insult Haskel or other functional
> or strongly typed languages or the people who use them.  I'm simply
> trying to be pragmatic and recognize that people who want to write an
> app in haskel that manually bangs the Wayland protocol isn't the
> target audience.
> 
> 
> --Jason

Completely agree with Jason here.

Actually the present "enum" are just mnemotic to 32-bit int or uint
values (and that's why the type field in current protocol is "int" or
"uint" instead of things like "enum"). Though developers of
strongly-typed languages may not like it, it is versatile and makes
sense. Any attempt to define what an "enum" or "bitfield" is will change
the current semantics and introduce a lot of complexity. There may exist
a way to make it work perfectly (and I'm okay with it if it really
exists), but I doubt whether the effort worth it since it doesn't do any
good to C or C++ wayland programmers, who are the main targeted audience
of wayland.

Regards,
Boyan Ding