The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Abstraction for its own sake

This is a rather small and unfocused rant on unnecessary abstractions. It may be related to this wiki page on abstraction not scaling; it may not be (told you this was unfocused).

I'm in the process of writing the Sendmail interface for the greylist daemon, and as far as that goes, it's very simple for this application—it just requires the writing of four functions, one that's given the IP address of the remote SMTP server, one that's given the sender email address, one that's given the recipient email address, and one to clean up any resources allocated from the other functions.

Like I said, pretty easy and straightforward.

The oddness comes in the first function's definition. It's:

sfsistat xxfi_connect(SMFICTX *ctx,char *hostname,_SOCK_ADDR *hostaddr);

The _SOCK_ADDR variable contains the IP address of the remote SMTP server. What is it? I dunno. What does it contain? I dunno. All I care about is the actual IP address, and I presume it's somewhere in this variable (most likely a structure of some kind). But there's no further API for pulling any useful information out of this _SOCK_ADDR.

Well, let's dive into the header files:

#ifndef _SOCK_ADDR
# define _SOCK_ADDR     struct sockaddr
#endif /* ! _SOCK_ADDR */

For some reason, the writers of Sendmail felt it prudent to hide the definition of the IP address behind another name. Presumably to make their code more portable to other non-BSD-derived network stacks that don't use struct sockaddr to store IP addresses.

But that does my code no good. I don't care about the hostname, I care about the IP address, yet without further information, I don't know exactly what I have. Is it the binary form of the address? How big? (there's IPv4, in which each address is 32 bits long, and IPv6, in which each address is 128 bits long) I had to dive into the header files to find out what exactly I'm given.

And it's not like the above definition of _SOCK_ADDR is wrapped around other #ifdef's checking for various operating systems or network stacks. The above definition is it! That's all there is.

So I really have to wonder why they felt this further abstraction for their code was necessary. It seems to be abstraction for abstraction's sake. Here's a hint: you aren't going to need it.

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