Declare public types with tags to allow forward declaration

[Nelarius]

Problem

In Clay, the public API structs are declared without tags:

typedef struct {
    // fields...
} Clay_RenderCommandArray;

This means that, at least to my knowledge, the types can't be forward-declared when defining things in a header for e.g. a render backend:

#pragma once

// NOTE: I must include clay.h for Clay_RenderCommandArray
#include <clay.h>

struct clay_gpu_context;
struct gpu_render_pass;

void clay_gpu_render_commands(
    struct clay_gpu_context*, struct gpu_render_pass*, Clay_RenderCommandArray* commands,
    vec2s frame_size);

To be clear, this is a somewhat pedantic request, but it's nice to be able to keep headers as free of includes as possible 🙂

Proposal

Declare public types as

typedef struct Clay_RenderCommandArray {
    // fields...
} Clay_RenderCommandArray;

to allow forward-declaring the tag names in our headers.

Would be happy to make a pr if this is something deemed useful.

[emoon]

This is incorrect. You just do this

#pragma once

struct Clay_RenderCommandArray;
struct clay_gpu_context;
struct gpu_render_pass;

void clay_gpu_render_commands(
    struct clay_gpu_context*, struct gpu_render_pass*, struct Clay_RenderCommandArray* commands,
    vec2s frame_size);

And it will work fine.

[Nelarius]

But aren't struct Clay_RenderCommandArray and typedef struct {} Clay_RenderCommandArray distinct declarations? 🤔

[emoon]

I had a closer look at this and you are correct that you need do:

typedef struct Clay_RenderCommandArray {
    // fields...
} Clay_RenderCommandArray;

I confused the C rule with the C++ rule which will implicitly name the struct as well as do the typedef.

[nicbarker]

Hi @Nelarius, thanks for opening this issue! Looks like an oversight on my part for sure, I'm reasonably certain this wont impact any current usage so very happy for you to PR those changes if you have time! 🙂