[Miwi-middleware] KIARA: Version 0.9.3

[Dmitri Rubinstein]

Hi. I finished and pushed to ZHAW Gitorious Repos a new version of 
KIARA. This is a minor feature and bugfix release.

* New features/bugfixes:

1. Automatic allocation with malloc and initialization of C-structs.

In previous release all structs required explicit allocators and 
deallocators. Here example from the documentation:

KIARA_DECL_STRUCT_WITH_API(LocationList,
   KIARA_STRUCT_ARRAY_MEMBER(Location_ptr, locations, KIARA_INT, 
num_locations)
   ,
   KIARA_USER_API(AllocateType, LocationList_Allocate)
   KIARA_USER_API(DeallocateType, LocationList_Deallocate)
)

LocationList_Allocate allocated list with malloc and initialized it. 
LocationList_Deallocate deallocated the list.

Starting with the current release both can be omitted:

KIARA_DECL_STRUCT(LocationList,
   KIARA_STRUCT_ARRAY_MEMBER(Location_ptr, locations, KIARA_INT, 
num_locations)
)

KIARA compiler will generate default allocator and deallocator which 
will call malloc/free. Then compiler will generate constructor and 
destructor which will initialize all members of the structure.

Note that currently only array members declared with 
KIARA_STRUCT_ARRAY_MEMBER are supported. All other members are not 
initialized.

2. Semantic annotation of types.

In order to generate correct code we need to distinguish between 
different types. However, in C/C++ primitive types like char* can mean 
different things: either pointer to raw data ot pointer to 
null-terminated string. It is not possible to distinguish between the 
two uses based on the type.

In the current version the type system was extended with annotated 
types. Annotated type is an alias for another type and annotates it with 
additional semantic. Currently this feature is mostly used internally. 
But public API now provides two char* types:

KIARA_CHAR_PTR and KIARA_RAW_CHAR_PTR

KIARA_CHAR_PTR is internally an alias to the representation of char* 
with additional information that it is a pointer to the null terminated 
string.

KIARA_RAW_CHAR_PTR is just a pointer to char or int8_t and has no 
additional semantic.

The difference is the generated code when type is allocated/deallocated 
and serialized/deserialized.

3. Fixed bug when registering and printing of recursive types like:

typedef struct IntList {
     struct IntList *next;
     int data;
} IntList;

There are no changes in installation instructions.

Best,

Dmitri