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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
+<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
+<title>LLDB Tutorial</title>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+ <div class="www_title">
+ The SB API Coding Rules
+ </div>
+
+<div id="container">
+ <div id="content">
+ <!--#include virtual="sidebar.incl"-->
+ <div id="middle">
+ <div class="post">
+ <h1 class ="postheader">SB API Coding Rules</h1>
+ <div class="postcontent">
+
+
+ <p>The SB APIs constitute the stable C++ API that lldb presents to external clients,
+ and which get processed by SWIG to produce the Python bindings to lldb. As such
+ it is important that they not suffer from the binary incompatibilities that C++ is
+ so susceptible to. We've established a few rules to ensure that this happens.
+
+ <p>The classes in the SB API's are all called SB&lt;SomeName&gt;, where SomeName is in CamelCase
+ starting with an upper case letter. The method names are all CamelCase with initial
+ capital letter as well.
+
+ <p>All the SB API classes are non-virtual, single inheritance classes. They should only include
+ SBDefines.h or other SB headers as needed. There should be no inlined method implementations
+ in the header files, they should all be in the implementation files. And there should be no
+ direct ivar access.
+
+ <p>You also need to choose the ivars for the class with care, since you can't add or remove ivars
+ without breaking binary compatibility. In some cases, the SB class is a thin wrapper around
+ an interal lldb_private object. In that case, the class can have a single ivar, which is
+ either a pointer, shared_ptr or unique_ptr to the object in the lldb_private API. All the
+ lldb_private classes that get used this way are declared as opaque classes in lldb_forward.h,
+ which is included in SBDefines.h. So if you need an SB class to wrap an lldb_private class
+ that isn't in lldb_forward.h, add it there rather than making a direct opaque declaration in
+ the SB classes .h file.
+
+ <p>If the SB Class needs some state of its own, as well as the backing object, don't include that
+ as a direct ivar in the SB Class. Instead, make an Impl class in the SB's .cpp file, and then
+ make the SB object hold a shared or unique pointer to the Impl object. The theory behind this is
+ that if you need more state in the SB object, those needs are likely to change over time,
+ and this way the impl class can pick up members without changing the size of the object.
+ An example of this is the SBValue class.
+
+ <p>In order to fit into the Python API's, we need to be able to default construct all the SB objects.
+ Since the ivars of the classes are all pointers of one sort or other, this can easily be done, but
+ it means all the methods must be prepared to handle their opaque implementation pointer being
+ empty, and doing something reasonable. We also always have an "IsValid" method on all the SB
+ classes to report whether the object is empty or not.
+
+ <p>Another piece of the SB API infrastructure is the Python (or other script interpreter) customization.
+ SWIG allows you to add property access, iterators and documentation to classes, but to do that you have to use
+ a Swig interface file in place of the .h file. Those files have a different format than a straight C++ header file. These
+ files are called SB&lt;ClassName&gt;.i, and live in "scripts/interface". They are constructed by
+ starting with the associated .h file, and adding documentation and the Python decorations, etc. We
+ do this in a decidedly low-tech way, by maintaining the two files in parallel. That simplifies the
+ build process, but it does mean that if you add a method to the C++ API's for an SB class, you have
+ to copy the interface to the .i file.
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>