51–60 of 94 posts
What are the alternatives to these libc functions? Making C even more bare bones than it already is makes no sense.
In a cross-platform application you can create a platform layer that wraps OS API usage and provides a POSIX fallback for the platforms you don't directly implement.
This just goes to show how hard it is to create a API to last 30 years. So much has changed since then, but libc needs to keep the same API. Things like Unicode and the internet (which brought the need for security to forefront) have come into popularity since then, but you can’t fix the old functions.
It still boggles the mind how a function that leaves a C string potentially unterminated ever even made it into the standard...
This just goes to show how hard it is to create a API to last 30 years. So much has changed since then, but libc needs to keep the same API. Things like Unicode and the internet (which brought the need for security to forefront) have come into popularity since then, but you can’t fix the old functions.
Well, that and also a showcase of just how BAD the design of the C stdlib string functions was, and continued to be with every iteration where someone introduced a new bad-and-poorly-thought-out API to replace the old bad-and-poorly-thought-out API. It still boggles the mind how a function that leaves a C string potentially unterminated ever even made it into the standard...
Easy to say with 50 years of hindsight. These are the pioneers we are talking about here. It boggles the mind how much they got right.
What are the alternatives to these libc functions? Making C even more bare bones than it already is makes no sense.
I never spent any time in the early DOS/Windows world, but from what I heard similar coding patterns were found there.
I was unpleasantly surprised by how much locales are used for seemingly trivial things. It's even the case with the C++ iostreams stuff. I ended up writing my own functions in an 'ascii' namespace to avoid all this as much as possible. This [0] rant about locales and how they're nigh-on impossible to use correctly is quite amusing (slightly NSFW) [0] https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02...
BOOST_LEXICAL_CAST_ASSUME_C_LOCALE
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that and also a showcase of just how BAD the design of the C stdlib string functions was, and continued to be with every iteration where someone introduced a new bad-and-poorly-thought-out API to replace the old bad-and-poorly-thought-out API. It still boggles the mind how a function that leaves a C string potentially unterminated ever even made it into the standard...
>It still boggles the mind how a function that leaves a C string potentially unterminated ever even made it into the standard... Easy to say with 50 years of hindsight. These are the pioneers we are talking about here. It boggles the mind how much they got right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still doesn't cover signals, only works if C11 threads are being used (it is all open if OS threads follow the same TLS mechanism), and those C89 and C99 code bases get nothing from it anyway.
In practice it works with major thread implementations even before C11, even though it doesn't say so in the standard. You can't call OS functions from a signal handler so I can't see why signals would matter. Have I missed something?
You can, as long as these functions are "async signal safe", see https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/signal-safety.7.html for details.
This just goes to show how hard it is to create a API to last 30 years. So much has changed since then, but libc needs to keep the same API. Things like Unicode and the internet (which brought the need for security to forefront) have come into popularity since then, but you can’t fix the old functions.
Well, that and also a showcase of just how BAD the design of the C stdlib string functions was, and continued to be with every iteration where someone introduced a new bad-and-poorly-thought-out API to replace the old bad-and-poorly-thought-out API. It still boggles the mind how a function that leaves a C string potentially unterminated ever even made it into the standard...