What do we gain from this? Several things.
* First, usage of PATH_MAX (the POSIX constant) is eliminated.
PATH_MAX is actually a lie; Linux and OS X (and probably other BSDs
too) do not have an actual path length limit. Linux claims 4096,
OS X claims 1024, but it is trivial to construct paths that are
longer.
* Second, while Windows does enforce a limit of MAX_PATH (the Win32
constant) for its ASCII functions, the Unicode variants, when
used with UNC paths, do not have this restriction.
The capability to use UNC paths is useful by itself, as it allows
to access files on network shares directly.
* Third, representing paths as std::string will make it easier to
interoperate with *W WinAPI functions later.
This will allow us to use non-POD classes inside these objects
in future and is otherwise functionally equivalent, as well
as more concise.
Note that there are some subtleties with handling of
brace-initialization. Specifically:
On aggregates (e.g. simple C-style structures) using an empty
brace-initializer zero-initializes the aggregate, i.e. it makes
all members zero.
On non-aggregates an empty brace-initializer calls the default
constructor. And if the constructor doesn't explicitly initialize
the members (which the auto-generated constructor doesn't) then
the members will be constructed but otherwise uninitialized.
So, what is an aggregate class? To quote the C++ standard
(C++03 8.5.1 §1):
An aggregate is an array or a class (clause 9) with no
user-declared constructors (12.1), no private or protected
non-static data members (clause 11), no base classes (clause 10),
and no virtual functions (10.3).
In SolveSpace, we only have to handle the case of base classes;
Constraint and Entity have those. Thus, they had to gain a default
constructor that does nothing but initializes the members to zero.
The SolveSpace top-level directory was getting a bit cluttered, so
following the example of numerous other free-software projects, we move the
main application source into a subdirectory and adjust the build systems
accordingly.
Also, got rid of the obj/ directory in favor of creating it on the fly in
Makefile.msvc.
whitequark
Marc Britten
Daniel Richard G