Data pointer parameter for Anvil::Buffer::create was removed?

[Silverlan]

Anvil::Buffer::create used to have a pointer parameter for the data that should be written into the buffer memory at initialization. With the new Anvil::BufferCreateInfo struct, which now has to be used instead, that parameter is gone.
Instead, you have to use Anvil::BufferCreateInfo::set_client_data, which I don't think is very intuitive/obvious at all (especially because that function has no description).

I think the existence and function of Anvil::BufferCreateInfo::set_client_data should be made more clear, or the data parameter for Anvil::BufferCreateInfo::create_sparse_no_alloc should be brought back.

[DominikWitczakAMD]

Yeah, I really wish the documentation was in much better shape..

The idea behind the recent refactoring was to move any optional parameters describing the about-to-be-created object to a separate "create info" structure. By default, these parameters would be assigned values corresponding to either legacy API behavior (where appropriate) or such that would not affect programmers unaware of their existence.

The change became a necessity at some point because the API continues to grow at a pace where we would soon end up with function declarations that take >10 arguments and which would be tedious to use.

User-specified buffer contents to be uploaded at memory block assignment time makes logical sense for fully-resident and sparsely-bound buffers, but starts being problematic if you look at partially-resident buffers where only a subset of pages may be bound physical memory, or where different pages may be assigned the same memory blocks. That's one of the reasons "default data" has been assumed to be an optional parameter.

I agree about the inconvenient naming, it stems from my former GL experience :-) I'm going to improve the documentation for the set_client_data() function so it makes more sense to people.

Thanks for noting this!