Re: [PATCH v6 07/16] merge-recursive: avoid returning a wholesale struct

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Aug 4, 2016, 18:09 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqk2fw4d8z.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <4cbe2757bd921a202c359382086fadeb2616434a.1470051326.git.johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>

Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> It is technically allowed, as per C89, for functions' return type to
> be complete structs (i.e. *not* just pointers to structs).
>
> However, it was just an oversight of this developer when converting
> Python code to C code in 6d297f8 (Status update on merge-recursive in
> C, 2006-07-08) which introduced such a return type.
>
> Besides, by converting this construct to pass in the struct, we can now
> start returning a value that can indicate errors in future patches. This
> will help the current effort to libify merge-recursive.c.

I do not think returning a small struct by value is unconditionally a bad thing, but I do agree with you that this change makes the resulting code much easier to read, especially once this starts returning errors.

Good.