🔗 Introduction and conventions
🔗 Introduction
The Squid source code has evolved more from empirical observation and tinkering, rather than a solid design process. It carries a legacy of being “touched” by numerous individuals, each with somewhat different techniques and terminology.
Squid is a (mostly) single-process proxy server. Every request is handled by the main process, with the exception of FTP. However, Squid does not use a threads package such has Pthreads. While this might be easier to code, it suffers from portability and performance problems. Instead Squid maintains data structures and state information for each active request.
The code is often difficult to follow because there are no explicit state variables for the active requests. Instead, thread execution progresses as a sequence of callback functions which get executed when I/O is ready to occur, or some other event has happened. As a callback function completes, it is responsible for registering the next callback function for subsequent I/O.
Note there is only a pseudo-consistent naming scheme. In most cases
functions are named like moduleFooBar(). However, there are also some
functions named like module_foo_bar().
Note that the Squid source changes rapidly, and some parts of this document may become out-of-date. If you find any inconsistencies, please feel free to modify this document.
🔗 Conventions
Function names and file names will be written in a courier font, such as
store.c and storeRegister(). Data structures and their members will
be written in an italicized font, such as StoreEntry.
🔗 Coding Conventions
🔗 Infrastructure
Most custom types and tools are documented in the code or the relevant portions of this manual. Some key points apply globally however.
🔗 Fixed width types
If you need to use specific width types - such as a 16 bit unsigned integer, use one of the following types. To access them simply include “config.h”.
- int16_t - 16 bit signed.
- u_int16_t - 16 bit unsigned.
- int32t - 32 bit signed.
- u_int32_t - 32 bit unsigned.
- int64_t - 64 bit signed.
- u_int64_t - 64 bit unsigned.