[swift-dev] C Macros and Variadic functions

[Ryan Lovelett]

I'm beginning to try to port some of my existing C code over to Swift
(you have no idea how excited that makes me). Unfortunately, I've hit a
stumbling block.

When interacting with some of the system/hardware interfaces in Linux it
sometimes (often?) becomes necessary to interact with I/O Control
(ioctl). This introduces two complexities that at least appear to me as
needing resolution.

The first is C macros. A lot ioctl interfaces use headers which define
macros that are specific ioctl request operations. These macros
typically take the form of `_IO`, `_IOR` or `_IOW` (there are more but
this should give you a picture). These values are typically bound to a
specific kernel version and thus are subject to change. I point that out
because obviously one could just calculate the value and hard-code it
into the Swift source (which is what I plan to do in the short term) but
this isn't really a portable solution across kernels. The question is
what, if anything, is planned around this?

The second is variadic C functions. In my case I went ahead and
calculated the result of a C macro and hard coded it into a Swift
variable (e.g., `let DMX_SET_BUFFER_SIZE: CUnsignedInt = 28461`). This
was so I could send it to an ioctl call (e.g., `ioctl(fileReference!,
DMX_SET_BUFFER_SIZE, DVBDVR.DVR_BUFFER_SIZE)`). Unfortunately, this died
in the compiler with `error: 'ioctl' is unavailable: Variadic function
is unavailable`. The interesting part of the compiler error was this
though `SwiftGlibc.ioctl:2:13: note: 'ioctl' has been explicitly marked
unavailable here`. This seems to imply that it _could_ be on and it just
isn't. I searched around a bit and found a few PRs [1] [2] [3] that seem
to indicate that Swift does support variadic C functions. Is there a
reason why ioctl is not?

Sorry if this has been asked or addressed before but I'm at a loss as to
how to search these mailing lists.

[1] https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/196
[2] https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/413
[3] https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/pull/38