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from the ilibc-ulibc-we-all-C-for-libc dept.
dalias writes
"The musl libc project has released version 1.0, the result of three years of development and testing. Musl is a lightweight, fast, simple, MIT-licensed, correctness-oriented alternative to the GNU C library (glibc), uClibc, or Android's Bionic. At this point musl provides all mandatory C99 and POSIX interfaces (plus a lot of widely-used extensions), and well over 5000 packages are known to build successfully against musl.
Several options are available for trying musl. Compiler toolchains are available from the musl-cross project, and several new musl-based Linux distributions are already available (Sabotage and Snowflake, among others). Some well-established distributions including OpenWRT and Gentoo are in the process of adding musl-based variants, and others (Aboriginal, Alpine, Bedrock, Dragora) are adopting musl as their default libc."
(Score: 1) by ArghBlarg on Thursday March 20 2014, @08:11PM
All right, I should resist, but I'd like to make one final point in the spirit of *constructive* discussion.
1. Programmers should be lazy, in the respect that underlying causes of common errors are solved, rather than manually fixing the same things over and over again. So on that point, I'll take your 'lazy bum' label and wrap it around myself proudly. Perhaps in the meantime I could be diligent in future projects and write my own wrappers around the (still not-good-enough) snprintf(), strncpy(), strncat() libs and try to apply them everywhere I can.
But they won't be standard, and they won't be in the OSes I use.
2. You still have not added constructively to this discussion by stating what better solution there is, or might be. If you truly believe the status quo is the best there is or will ever be, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. I, for one, would like to keep thinking about the possibilities for a better solution.
So: What's your better solution, that will allow all programmers henceforth to be able to use strings without worrying as much about buffer overflows and fencepost errors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gringer on Thursday March 20 2014, @08:19PM
A higher level language.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by ArghBlarg on Thursday March 20 2014, @10:03PM
Fair enough, that's a valid solution for userspace development. Still doesn't address the fact that all current mainstream OSes are effectively locked-in to the use of C-style strings. Maybe that's not a problem for anyone else but me.