Working with vendor code in C can get very tricky, especially when you except breaking changes to occur. Especially when you have multiple binaries depending on that vendor code, updating at different times, necessitating different live versions. Let’s explore.

Introduction

Assume you’re working with an external vendor, who is providing you with code for a wonderful function getFoo:

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// foo.h version 1.2.3

int getFoo();

// foo.c version 1.2.3

int getFoo() {
  sleep(1000); // TODO improve performance
  return 42
}

You use this function in many of your products - for example, in your best-selling barApp application:

Vacations are a great time for doing that problematic category of things every management course teaches you about: important, but not urgent. For some people, it’s housework or schoolwork which gets drowned out by day-to-day life. For others it’s keeping up with friends and family. Myself, I also like to read and write.

Writing, for me, is usually about practical stuff. Sometimes it’s simply code (most of those projects were written on vacations). Other times, it’s writing to this blog (in one of its incarnations) - which usually has to do with technical tinkering of some sort or other. It’s not that I don’t do enough writing in my day job; but there does tend to be an accumulation of things to write: “I should blog about that”, “I should write that code”, “I should try and get my router to do that”, and so forth. When a few days off come by, and I feel that I have enough time to get more urgent stuff done - it’s quite satisfying to be able to dig into that write-queue.