Re: [PATCH 0/2] improve code portability

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

On Mon, Apr 03, 2023 at 09:30:22AM -0700, Tyler Retzlaff wrote:
> Improve portability of telemetry code to allow it to be compiled by msvc
> unconditionally.
> 
> Remove use of VLA and instead dynamically allocate. MSVC will never
> implement VLAs due to misuse / security concerns. 
> 
> Remove use of ranged based initializer (a gcc extension) instead just
> explicitly initialize individual array elements.
> 
> Tyler Retzlaff (2):
>   telemetry: use malloc instead of variable length array
>   telemetry: use portable syntax to initialize array
> 
Is this worth doing, given that DPDK telemetry uses a unix domain socket
for it's connectivity, which would not be available on windows anyway?
I don't particularly like these patches as:
* The removal of the VLAs means we will potentially be doing a *lot* of
  malloc and free calls inside the telemetry code. It may not be a data
  path or particularly performance critical, but I know for things like CPU
  busyness, users may want to call telemetry functions hundreds (or
  potentially thousands) of times a second. It also makes the code slightly
  harder to read, and introduces the possibility of us having memory leaks.
* The second patch just makes the code uglier. True, it's non-standard, but
  it really does make the code a whole lot more readable and managable. If
  we need to make this standards-conforming, then I think we need to drop
  the "const", and do runtime init of this array with loops for the ranges.

All that said, if we do have a path to get telemetry working on windows, I
think we can work together to get a suitable patchset in for it.

/Bruce