qapi: Adjust layout of FooList types

By sticking the next pointer first, we don't need a union with
64-bit padding for smaller types.  On 32-bit platforms, this
can reduce the size of uint8List from 16 bytes (or 12, depending
on whether 64-bit ints can tolerate 4-byte alignment) down to 8.
It has no effect on 64-bit platforms (where alignment still
dictates a 16-byte struct); but fewer anonymous unions is still
a win in my book.

It requires visit_next_list() to gain a size parameter, to know
what size element to allocate; comparable to the size parameter
of visit_start_struct().

I debated about going one step further, to allow for fewer casts,
by doing:
    typedef GenericList GenericList;
    struct GenericList {
        GenericList *next;
    };
    struct FooList {
        GenericList base;
        Foo *value;
    };
so that you convert to 'GenericList *' by '&foolist->base', and
back by 'container_of(generic, GenericList, base)' (as opposed to
the existing '(GenericList *)foolist' and '(FooList *)generic').
But doing that would require hoisting the declaration of
GenericList prior to inclusion of qapi-types.h, rather than its
current spot in visitor.h; it also makes iteration a bit more
verbose through 'foolist->base.next' instead of 'foolist->next'.

Note that for lists of objects, the 'value' payload is still
hidden behind a boxed pointer.  Someday, it would be nice to do:

struct FooList {
    FooList *next;
    Foo value;
};

for one less level of malloc for each list element.  This patch
is a step in that direction (now that 'next' is no longer at a
fixed non-zero offset within the struct, we can store more than
just a pointer's-worth of data as the value payload), but the
actual conversion would be a task for another series, as it will
touch a lot of code.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <1455778109-6278-10-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/qapi/qapi-visit-core.c b/qapi/qapi-visit-core.c
index f856286461..b4a0f21b36 100644
--- a/qapi/qapi-visit-core.c
+++ b/qapi/qapi-visit-core.c
@@ -50,9 +50,10 @@ void visit_start_list(Visitor *v, const char *name, Error **errp)
     v->start_list(v, name, errp);
 }
 
-GenericList *visit_next_list(Visitor *v, GenericList **list)
+GenericList *visit_next_list(Visitor *v, GenericList **list, size_t size)
 {
-    return v->next_list(v, list);
+    assert(list && size >= sizeof(GenericList));
+    return v->next_list(v, list, size);
 }
 
 void visit_end_list(Visitor *v)