RFC abstracting atomics

[Morten Brørup]

> From: Bruce Richardson [mailto:bruce.richardson at intel.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 11 January 2023 11.10
> 
> One additional point that just became clear to me when I started
> thinking
> about upping our DPDK C-standard-baseline. We need to be careful what
> we
> are considering when we up our C baseline. We can mandate a specific
> compiler minimum and C version for compiling up DPDK itself, but I
> think we
> should not mandate that for the end applications.

Why not?

And do you consider this backwards compatibility a build time or run time requirement?

> 
> That means that our header files, such as atomics, should not require
> C99
> or C11 even if the build of DPDK itself does. More specifically, even
> if we
> bump DPDK minimum to C11, we should still allow apps to build using
> older
> compiler settings.
> 
> Therefore, we probably need to maintain non-C11 atomics code paths in
> headers beyond the point at which DPDK itself uses C11 as a code
> baseline.

Am I misunderstanding your suggestion here: Code can be C11, but all APIs and header files must be C89?

Wouldn't that also prevent DPDK inline functions from being C11?

> 
> /Bruce