[opinion][Research] API design

[SilverWarior]

It is hard to say without having access to your entire codebase.

If you have each Subsystem in separate unit then your second code example actually seems more intuitive as you get clear information on which unit has defined certain object type. It also gives you ability to have different units for different platforms.

But if you ever decide to put your game engine into a single package I don't think such approach would be quite suitable. I'm not even sure if this would even work if built into a single package.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Naming conventions... ARGH!

I would say do whatever makes it work for you. We adapt to the different naming/organisation conventions and I personally don't really have a preference. I've tried numerous approaches and concluded some time in the future that they were all clunky or less than optimal. Now I just do what feels right at the time, although I don't publish a lot of code.

[Ñuño Martínez]

If you have each Subsystem in separate unit then your second code example actually seems more intuitive as you get clear information on which unit has defined certain object type. It also gives you ability to have different units for different platforms.

That's just why I asked. Since I put each Subsystem in separate unit I feel it is natural to use the unit name instead of prefixes and suffixes. I just wonder why it isn't used a lot.

Naming conventions... ARGH!

Yeah.

I would say do whatever makes it work for you. We adapt to the different naming/organisation conventions and I personally don't really have a preference. I've tried numerous approaches and concluded some time in the future that they were all clunky or less than optimal. Now I just do what feels right at the time, although I don't publish a lot of code.

That's my fear: What if it is clunky. I know it may be less than optimal since you have to write more, and it would be prone to mistakes if calling a procedure that has the name duplicated in several units without the unit name (i.e. the "Init" method). If there were a way to force to write the unit name...

[SilverWarior]

After thinking some more on this topic I must admit that I'm becoming less and less inclined to your second approach of using using unit names instead of prefixes. Why?
As you pointed out yourself calling certain method that is implemented in multiple units with same name without providing unit name will lead to unexpected behavior. I'm not sure about FPC but in case of Delphi I believe the method from the unit that was last loaded would be called in such scenario.
Another disadvantage of such approach is that you are basically forcing yourself to have each system in its own unit. While often this is perfectly fine there are times were you might want to have several connected systems in a single unit in order to improve code readability.
Wouldn't this also mean that you will have to ad every unit into uses section of your main application unit?
Also having bunch of small units could have significant affect to build time. Now wile Object Pascal compilers are know to have very fast compile times due the fact that only modified code is recompiled having bunch of small units could still lead to long build times. This mostly due the fact that linker still needs to link a bunch of small compiled code pieces together in order to build final application.

[Ñuño Martínez]

You have some points here.

I was coding some time now and besides the build time it seems nice to me. Thankfully Lazarus is able to rename all references by itself, or I can use a tool I wrote some time ago to help with Allegro.pas development, so if I change my mind I can change all identifiers. It isn't TRUNK yet.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Real life strikes back.

I was working on the disk access API, and I've found some of the issues you, SilverWarrior, were talking about. Of course, using the unit name fixes all problems, but I spend some valuable time wondering if TStream should be the original Classes.TStream or the one I extended...

So I've decided to back to the prefix. It was a nice experiment though.

[SilverWarior]

but I spend some valuable time wondering if TStream should be the original Classes.TStream or the one I extended...

One piece of advice. If you are extending some class with new functionality it is recommended to change the name of the extended class in order to avoid confusing it with the original class that it was extended from.
That is unless you want your extended class to be used as a base class for other classes that have been extended from the original class and thus in a way inject additional functionality to all of them.