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Re: What's an annex? stratum?


Michael Eager wrote:
Looking at target.c, I see some terms which are less
than clear:  annex and stratum.  Could someone tell me
what these mean?
"Annex" is apparently an introduction of Andrew's from 2004, does kind of look like an address space addition, although not clear that it's fully implemented.

"Stratum" is an old concept, merely a way to talk about different levels of the target stack. In practice, the stacking concept isn't as clean as it must have seemed initially; sometimes you really want to run a target op in a vector down in the stack, sometimes you want to replace a target vector in the middle. So we introduce strata as a way to find a mid-stack target vector of a desired type. First big block comment in target.h goes into a bit more detail.

Aside: there are comments in the gdb code which tell me that the previous code did things badly and that the new scheme is better. Usually there's no description of the new scheme. I don't know about others, but I find these comments are both distracting and unhelpful.
Probably not much consolation, but I'm having the same trouble with Mozilla sources these days. :-)

Stan


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