Currently in the entire C API of WPILib we have ~8 different ways of handling strings. The C API actually isn't built for pure C callers (We don't actually have any of those). Instead, they're built for interop between languages like LabVIEW and C# which can talk to C API's directly.
For output parameters, the choice was fairly obvious. An output struct containing a const string pointer and a length makes the most sense. Its easy to use these from most other languages, and doesn't require special null termination handling. Freeing these is also easy, as if you ever receive one of these string structures, theres just a single function call to free it.
Input parameters are a bit more complex. To be used from pure C, and from LabVIEW, a null terminated string is the best in most cases. However, null terminated strings in general have a lot of downsides. Additionally, from LabVIEW there are other considerations around encoding that having a wrapper struct helps make a bit easier. From a language like C#, a wrapper struct is by far the easiest, as custom marshalling can make it trivial to marshal both UTF8 and UTF16 strings down.
The final consideration is its nice to have an identical concept for both input and output. It makes the rules fairly easy to understand.
WPILib will not have any APIs that manipulate a string allocated externally. This means WPI_String can be const, as across the boundary it is always const.
If a WPILib API takes a const WPI_String*, WPILib will not manipulate or attempt to free that string, and that string is treated as an input. It is up to the caller to handle that memory, WPILib will never hold onto that memory longer than the call.
If a WPILib API takes a WPI_String*, that string is an output. WPILib will allocate that API with WPI_AllocateString(), fill in the string, and return to the caller. When the caller is done with the string, they must free it with WPI_FreeString().
If an output struct contains a WPI_String member, that member is considered read only, and should not be explicitly freed. The caller should call the free function for that struct.
If an array of WPI_Strings are returned, each individual string is considered read only, and should not be explicitly freed. The free function for that array should be called by the caller.
If an input struct containing a WPI_String, or an input array of WPI_Strings is passed to WPILib, the individual strings will not be manipulated or freed by WPILib, and the caller owns and should free that memory.
Callbacks also follow these rules. The most common is a callback either getting passed a const WPI_String* or a struct containing a WPI_String. In both of these cases, the callback target should consider these strings read only, and not attempt to free them or manipulate them.
DataLog is now a base class, with DataLogBackgroundWriter being the
background thread version and DataLogWriter being a non-threaded version.
Also split the C header into a separate file to make it more wpiformat friendly.
We now use a wrapper (wpi::print) to catch exceptions since we can't patch
std::print() to not throw when we ultimately migrate to it.
fmtlib and std format/print throw the same exceptions and always have. We previously patched fmt::print() to not throw a write failure exception, but we can't do that for std::print(); wpi::print() is the migration plan.
Uses getUsableSpace in Java, matching how C++ determines available space (C++ calls it available, but they mean the same thing.) This fixes a bug where logs wouldn't get deleted due to incorrect available space detection.
The DataLog thread now also checks if the state was marked as stopped after a call to StartLogFile.
When low on space, a log file won't be created. This is detected as a "deletion", and the DataLog thread will continously try to create a log, fail to do so because of low space, detect it as a "deletion", and do so in a loop.
If there's not enough space, the DataLog will be marked as stopped, preventing this infinite loop. Calls to start() will hit this code path and mark it as stopped again.
Dynamic structs had a few major issues.
In C++, if the string was the last definition in the schema, attempting to set a string would trigger an assertion. This has been fixed
Setting a string value could truncate the string actually stored in the struct, if the definition was shorter than the string to set.
There was no way to detect if this case occurred. The set string function now returns a bool if the string was fully written or not.
Reading a string that had a value shorter than the schema definition would result in embedded trailing nulls in the string. This would make comparing string equality basically impossible, as those embedded nulls count for the length of the string.
The above truncating didn't take into account UTF8 code points. This means a truncation could happen in the middle of a unicode character. Depending on the language this had different behavior, but unpaired code points are problematic to detect in any case. On the decoding side, detect if a split UTF8 code point has occurred by the writer, and if so just ignore it and treat it as not part of the string. Doing this on the receive side means a newer receive side is all that is needed to fix this, which is generally a better option then requiring all senders to update.
Actual DynamicStruct instances have 0 units tests for them. Added a bunch of unit tests around strings to ensure things work properly.
This required changing the constant values (e.g. kSize) into functions
(e.g. GetSize()).
Fixed implementations of ForEachNested to be inline (as these are actually
templates).
Also added a ntcore Struct test.
Restarting a stopped log results in creating a new log file with fresh copies of the same start records and schema data records.
Also check to see if the file has been deleted or if the log file exceeds 1.8 GB, and start a new one.
The previous fix didn't handle all cases correctly. Instead, add a new
function to raw_ostream (SetNumBytesInBuffer) to allow always using the
full buffer size, and revamp write_impl to more cleanly handle all
cases.
