RNAlib API v3.0

Introduction

With version 2.2 we introduce the new API that will take over the old one in the future version 3.0. By then, backwards compatibility will be broken, and third party applications using RNAlib need to be ported. This switch of API became necessary, since many new features found their way into the RNAlib where a balance between threadsafety and easy-to-use library functions is hard or even impossible to establish. Furthermore, many old functions of the library are present as slightly modified copies of themself to provide a crude way to overload functions.

Therefore, we introduce the new v3.0 API very early in our development stage such that developers have enough time to migrate to the new functions and interfaces. We also started to provide encapsulation of the RNAlib functions, data structures, typedefs, and macros by prefixing them with vrna_ and VRNA_ , respectively.

Header files should also be included using the ViennaRNA/ namespace, e.g.

#include <ViennaRNA/fold.h>

instead of just using

#include <fold.h>

as is has been required for RNAlib 1.x and 2.x.

This eases the work for programmers of third party applications that would otherwise need to put much effort into renaming functions and data types in their own implementations if their names appear in our library. Since we still provide backward compatibility up to the last version of RNAlib 2.x, this advantage may be fully exploited only starting from v3.0 which will be released in the future. However, our plan is to provide the possibility for an early switch-off mechanism of the backward compatibility in one of our next releases of ViennaRNA Package 2.x.

Major changes

…

Porting to the new API

…

Examples

Examples on how to use the new v3.0 API can be found in the C Examples section.