On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 7:30 PM, Stelian Ionescu sionescu@cddr.org wrote:

Dow we really need *parse-bare-structs-as-pointers* ? It's only used in one place(parse-deprecated-struct-type) and IMO it's useless: we should parse bare structs as pointers unconditionally and issue a warning that it's deprecated and will be removed on 2013-05-01

This is a good question. I was wondering about this myself, since I couldn't quite remember why I had introduced it. Turns out it is necessary. The problem is that struct types used to behave as pointers in some situations and as aggregate types in others. Blindly converting every RANDOM-STRUCT-TYPE to (:POINTER (:STRUCT RANDOM-STRUCT-TYPE)) would lead to incorrect results in various places: FOREIGN-TYPE-SIZE, FOREIGN-SLOT-VALUE, DEFCSTRUCT, etc.

We might be able to simplify the code a little bit if we flipped its default value to be true, though.

In any case, we already issue a deprecation warning, and we should definitely remove this backwards compatibility mess at some point. Not sure about the time frame, though. After the next CFFI release, we'll wait and see how fast CFFI-using libraries adapt.