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Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 12:18:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdl.org>
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To: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>, <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [patch] Workqueue Abstraction, 2.5.40-H7
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On Tue, 1 Oct 2002, Ingo Molnar wrote:

| i dont think i've encountered much kernel code that tried to pass
| structures along by value without a good reason - OTOH complex and
| inefficient function interfaces outweigh these instances, by far. And
| there's way too much code that has two screens full of local variable
| declarations, where in the middle a 3K big array gets easily lost to the
| eye. struct pre and postfix does not help much there.

Sounds like a good reason to have a gcc flag, or more likely a
Stanford checker or smatch checker for structs (or large typedefs :)
as return values.

| And structure pointers are almost as simple to pass around and handle as
| the basic types declared on the stack - and that is their main use. Ease
| of understanding is i think by far the most important aspect of source
| code - abuse and mistaken use of constructs is always possible, no matter
| how long the name is.

-- 
~Randy