C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software

Preface

Programmers are inundated with information about application programming interfaces, or APIs. Yet, while most programmers use APIs and the libraries that implement them in almost every application they write, relatively few create and disseminate new, widely applicable, APIs. Indeed, programmers seem to prefer to “roll their own” instead of searching for a library that might meet their needs, perhaps because it is easier to write application-specific code than to craft well-designed APIs.

I’m as guilty as the next programmer: lcc, a compiler for ANSI/ISO C written by Chris Fraser and myself, was built from the ground up. (lcc is described in A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation, Addison-Wesley, 1995.) A compiler exemplifies ...