Well, I was not expecting to read a 10,000-word article about the C standard library this morning. I haven't been programming in C as long as many here, but over the past dozen years or so I've always felt that the standard library is a half-baked hodgepodge of inconsistencies and a minefield of gotchas that have caused innumerable security vulnerabilities.
Why is open() in fcntl.h and close() in unistd.h? Why does bcopy go src,dst but memcpy go dst,src? Why did they make strlcpy return a different value than strncpy, so you can't improve a whole codebase with one recursive sed?
There are many questions I still have, but I learned a bunch of new things from this article. Thanks to the author for putting the effort into digesting the source material for us.
On a tangential topic, I don't know of a good reference for exploring what is included in the standard library. Yes, of course there are manpages for individual families of functions. But I don't know how anyone would find out about, say, strtok or strsep without encountering them in some existing code. I had a university assignment which would have been trivial if anyone in the class knew that fts.h existed.
Why is open() in fcntl.h and close() in unistd.h? Why does bcopy go src,dst but memcpy go dst,src? Why did they make strlcpy return a different value than strncpy, so you can't improve a whole codebase with one recursive sed?
There are many questions I still have, but I learned a bunch of new things from this article. Thanks to the author for putting the effort into digesting the source material for us.
On a tangential topic, I don't know of a good reference for exploring what is included in the standard library. Yes, of course there are manpages for individual families of functions. But I don't know how anyone would find out about, say, strtok or strsep without encountering them in some existing code. I had a university assignment which would have been trivial if anyone in the class knew that fts.h existed.