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It would be nice if the error messages generated would suggest replacement functions that they deem appropriate. I see that I'm not supposed to use gmtime, localtime, ctime, ctime_r, asctime, and asctime_r; but what do they think I should use?
Its really wild, as a person coming from other languages who has written maybe ten lines of C in his life that the functions that seem to be massive footguns in C are, like, "format a string" or "get time in GMT." That's... really scary.
Many of C's problems relate to string handling. These are all legacy functions which have been replaced with safe alternatives many decades ago. strcpy() was replaced with a safer strncpy() and in turn has been replaced with strlcpy(). The list is a ban of the less safe versions, where more modern alternatives exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but every hapless user shouldn't have to go searching through a bunch of commit messages to find the suggested replacement. Bad UX.
It seems pretty safe to assume a developer contributing C code to git itself would know how to use git blame (or the GitHub interface for it).
Its really wild, as a person coming from other languages who has written maybe ten lines of C in his life that the functions that seem to be massive footguns in C are, like, "format a string" or "get time in GMT." That's... really scary.
Its really wild, as a person coming from other languages who has written maybe ten lines of C in his life that the functions that seem to be massive footguns in C are, like, "format a string" or "get time in GMT." That's... really scary.
(~~Technically~~ Optionally, C11 has strcpy_s and strcat_s which fail explicitly on truncation. So if C11 is acceptable for you, that might be the a reasonable option, provided you always handle the failure case. Apparently, though, it is not usually implemented outside of Microsoft CRT.)
edit: Updated notes regarding C11.
Its really wild, as a person coming from other languages who has written maybe ten lines of C in his life that the functions that seem to be massive footguns in C are, like, "format a string" or "get time in GMT." That's... really scary.
Yeah, there is a culture of complacency in C probably owing to the enormous historical baggage of legacy code that has to be supported and the blurred line between stdlib and system call.
On BSDs and macOS you're always SOL because the syscall api isn't stable and only the C wrappers are.
I wonder how they copy strings with strcpy and strncpy both banned. strlcpy? But it is not conforming to major standards. Or just memcpy with extra code?
> we provide a compat version, so it's always available
/joke