On exclusively using names in the C-API

[dcodeIO]

As a follow-up to @kripken's comment in #1261:

For iteration, perhaps another option is something like a JS API that returns an array of the names, and a C API underneath that does something similar (mallocs a list that must later be freed, and returns it)? Just a suggestion, I'm not sure what is best, but overall I'd like to avoid using indexes (as we have names intentionally, and also, the indexes are internal and do not necessarily match the wasm binary indexes, which could be confusing).

There are two things that bother me about using names exclusively in the C-API:

• Not everything might have a (useful) name, especially when loading binaries without debug info
• In binaryen.js, decoding and encoding UTF8 strings for each invocation comes with quite some overhead

The logical way to avoid any issues there would be to use references / arrays of references (avoiding calling with indexes) instead, while the API could still expose GetXYByName methods for convenience. In turn, BinaryenRemoveExport and BinaryenRemoveImport would have to be renamed to BinaryenRemoveExportByName and BInaryenRemoveImportByName in favor of the reference versions without such a suffix.

wdyt?

[kripken]

Yeah, we should probably focus on using references where possible, for those reasons. Makes sense to rename to BinaryenRemoveExportByName as you suggest, too. And modules should provide getFunction which receives a name and returns a reference (I don't think it needs to be getFunctionByName, as there isn't another way to get a function from the module?)

We can't always, though, as the IR intentionally is designed to use names in specific places, like when creating functions in parallel - if a calls b and b calls a, and we build them in parallel, we don't have refs to give each other (nor do we have an index, we don't know which index they will have), so we must use names there. So creating a call instruction will receive a name.

But otherwise, whenever possible we should use references.

[dcodeIO]

Turned out that one convention could be:

• Using names in BinaryenAddSomething-style functions
• Something-references in BinaryenSomethingAdd-style ones

Hence closing.