31–40 of 222 posts
> Principles > Be extremely portable > sp.h is written in C99, and it compiles against any compiler and libc imaginable. It works on Linux, on Windows, on macOS. It works under a WASM host. It works in the browser. It works with MSVC, and MinGW, it works with or without libc, or with weird ones like Cosmopolitan. It works with the big compilers and it works with TCC. > And, best of all, it does all all of that becaus…
First, (on unix) it's wrapping pthread mutex. That's part of libc! (Technically it might not be libc.so, but it's still the standard library.)
Also, none of the atomics talk about the memory model. You don't _have_ to use the C11 memory model (Linux, for example, doesn't). But if you're not using the C11 memory model and letting the compiler insert fences for you, you definitely need to have fence instructions, yourself.
While C11 atomics do rely on libgcc, so do the __sync* functions that this library uses (see https://godbolt.org/z/bW1f7xGas) for an example.
Oops... apparently this is vibecoded. Welp, I just wasted ten minutes of my life reviewing slop that I'm not going to get back.
c8 buf [SP_PATH_MAX] = sp_zero;
sp_cstr_copy_to_n(path, len, buf, SP_PATH_MAX);
#define SP_PATH_MAX 4096
I agree with most of the criticisms they make. I agree that pointer and length is better than null-terminated strings (although it is difficult in C, and as they mention you will have to use a macro (or some additional functions) to work this in C). Making the C standard library directly against syscalls is also a good idea, although in some cases you might have an implementation that needs to not do this for some re…
How does it deal with code executing before main? Libc does a bunch of necessary stuff, like calling initializers for global variables.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Null terminated strings have some merits but they should be a completely different data type like in Freebasic.
Are there other merits than availability of literals in C? It seems like one of the worst data structures ever - lookup complexity of a linked list with a expansion complexity of an array list with security problems added as a bonus.
String tables in most object file formats work like that, a concatenated series of ASCIIZ strings. One byte of overhead (NUL), requires only an offset into one to address a string and you can share strings with common suffixes. It's a very compact layout.
> Principles > Be extremely portable > sp.h is written in C99, and it compiles against any compiler and libc imaginable. It works on Linux, on Windows, on macOS. It works under a WASM host. It works in the browser. It works with MSVC, and MinGW, it works with or without libc, or with weird ones like Cosmopolitan. It works with the big compilers and it works with TCC. > And, best of all, it does all all of that becaus…
Supporting obscure platforms is what makes portability "extreme", though.
> Principles > Be extremely portable > sp.h is written in C99, and it compiles against any compiler and libc imaginable. It works on Linux, on Windows, on macOS. It works under a WASM host. It works in the browser. It works with MSVC, and MinGW, it works with or without libc, or with weird ones like Cosmopolitan. It works with the big compilers and it works with TCC. > And, best of all, it does all all of that becaus…
> Principles > Be extremely portable > sp.h is written in C99, and it compiles against any compiler and libc imaginable. It works on Linux, on Windows, on macOS. It works under a WASM host. It works in the browser. It works with MSVC, and MinGW, it works with or without libc, or with weird ones like Cosmopolitan. It works with the big compilers and it works with TCC. > And, best of all, it does all all of that becaus…
I could not even find a mention what platform it supports. There is a Linux example on the bottom. Have never seem a libc implementation that does not even mention for which platforms it is meant.