Re: Calling C from RPG: what am I doing wrong?

[Barbara Morris <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Nathan Andelin wrote:
> > Barbara eventually explained that this was an unavoidable 
> > consequence of the code the compiler generates to handle varying
> > length return values, from which I concluded that such procedures
> > were potentially a bad practice.
>
> Is this only with "large" return values?  What about procedures that
> return say a 50 byte description [trimmed]?
>
> desc = codeDesc(code);

The problem is proportional to the size of the return value.  Calling a 
procedure that returns 50 bytes should not be a problem unless you call 
it a zillion times in the same procedure.

The problem isn't particularly related to varying-length return values. 
 There is some additional automatic storage required for a call to a 
procedure returning a value (probably not integer or float return 
values, though, unless they are arrays).

Varying-length return values are an issue because it seems like they 
should only have to return the actual returned length, but actually they 
have to return the prototype-defined length.