object: Improve documentation of interfaces

QOM interfaces allow a limited form of multiple inheritance, at the
condition of being stateless. That is, they cannot be instantiated
and a pointer to an interface shouldn't be dereferenceable in any way.
This is achieved by making the QOM instance type an incomplete type,
which is, as mentioned by Markus Armbruster, the closest you can get
to abstract class in C.

Incomplete types are widely used to hide implementation details, but
people usually expect to find at least one place where the type is
fully defined. The fact that it doesn't happen with QOM interfaces is
quite disturbing, especially since it isn't documented anywhere as
recently discussed in this thread:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2019-12/msg01579.html

Amend the documentation in the object.h header file to provide more
details about why and how to implement QOM interfaces using incomplete
types.

Signed-off-by: Greg Kurz <groug@kaod.org>
Reviewed-by: Marc-André Lureau <marcandre.lureau@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/qom/object.h b/include/qom/object.h
index f9ad692..bd68d19 100644
--- a/include/qom/object.h
+++ b/include/qom/object.h
@@ -200,8 +200,14 @@ typedef struct InterfaceInfo InterfaceInfo;
  *
  * Interfaces allow a limited form of multiple inheritance.  Instances are
  * similar to normal types except for the fact that are only defined by
- * their classes and never carry any state.  You can dynamically cast an object
- * to one of its #Interface types and vice versa.
+ * their classes and never carry any state.  As a consequence, a pointer to
+ * an interface instance should always be of incomplete type in order to be
+ * sure it cannot be dereferenced.  That is, you should define the
+ * 'typedef struct SomethingIf SomethingIf' so that you can pass around
+ * 'SomethingIf *si' arguments, but not define a 'struct SomethingIf { ... }'.
+ * The only things you can validly do with a 'SomethingIf *' are to pass it as
+ * an argument to a method on its corresponding SomethingIfClass, or to
+ * dynamically cast it to an object that implements the interface.
  *
  * # Methods #
  *