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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: 2, Informative) by dalias on Friday March 21 2014, @02:21AM
I'm the main author/maintainer of musl and this topic, C vs Pascal strings, is actually something I've addressed before, e.g. in this answer on Stack Overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4418708/whats-t he-rationale-for-null-terminated-strings/4419243#4 419243 [stackoverflow.com]
The other answers on that question are also very informative.
In short, Pascal strings force you to allocate storage and make copies of strings in many places where you could otherwise use them in place, which in turn creates failure cases, which people forget or don't think they need to check for, and therefore more bugs.
It would be nice if more interfaces took a (pointer,length) pair as an argument rather than requiring null termination, but storing the length at a fixed location relative to the string data is a bad design.