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0 pointsjeroenhd3y ago0 comments

It depends on your application, but if it's just generated code then I don't really see the problem with code size. As long as it's easy to (de)serialize data or add a nice big facade between the generated code and business logic, the generated backing code can be a complete mess of spaghetti code for all I care.

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dolmen3y ago

Size of generated code matters when the target is WASM to run in browsers.

londons_explore3y ago

But only if you have a lot of message formats...

Generally, message specifications are written by hand, so even a big project may only have a couple of hundred. Doesn't sound so bad.

Also, presumably, if code size really is a big concern, you can decode this in more code efficient ways too, as long as you are less concerned with performance.

quotemstr3y ago

You might be surprised to see how quickly mechanically-generated marshaling code adds up. Look at Android's frameworks.jar one day and see how much is just the same AIDL-generated Parcel-manipulation code over and over again. Cache effects and IO costs are so severe in modern computing that my default (but rebuttable!) position is to prefer table-driven approaches over code generation wherever possible.

Windows COM switched from codegen to table-driven "stubless" marshaling decades ago at no noticeable cost to performance and with a huge code size win.

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