[ Thanks to Ted Kenney
for this link. ]
“As embedded systems requirements grow and development cycles
shrink, developers increasingly integrate commercial application
programming interfaces (APIs), or collections of functions that the
software tool publisher provides for utilizing the tool’s features
within an application. Programmers choose these pre-built libraries
rather than code the required functionality by hand. Common
examples are communication, messaging, database, and user-interface
libraries. Such ‘middleware’ APIs offer benefits in terms of
convenience, portability, productivity and time-to-market.“But such libraries also often carry the risk of introducing
destructive and devilishly hard-to-find programming errors. This
risk stems from the manner in which commercial APIs are
implemented. The software functions comprising APIs are nearly
always data structure ignorant. Through their use of void pointers
to pass data between the API library and the application program,
they handle data without ‘knowing’ the type of data on which they
are operating…”