Data Structures

A number of SmartSockets inter-process communication (IPC) data structures are accessible from user-written programs. This is how these structures are defined (using typedef) in <rtworks/ipc.h>:

typedef struct T_IPC_MT_STRUCT T_IPC_MT_STRUCT, *T_IPC_MT; 
typedef struct T_IPC_MSG_STRUCT T_IPC_MSG_STRUCT, *T_IPC_MSG; 
typedef struct T_IPC_MSG_FIELD_STRUCT T_IPC_MSG_FIELD_STRUCT, 
   *T_IPC_MSG_FIELD; 
typedef struct T_IPC_MSG_FILE_STRUCT T_IPC_MSG_FILE_STRUCT, 
   *T_IPC_MSG_FILE; 
typedef struct T_IPC_CONN_STRUCT T_IPC_CONN_STRUCT, *T_IPC_CONN; 

These structure definitions are incomplete in the sense that none of the fields in the structure are defined here. This is one way of creating an opaque data type in C. Pointers to these structures cannot be de-referenced to look at what they point to. These pointers can only be manipulated through access functions. This protects users from changes to the underlying data structures.