What's the best way to deal with "transitive const-ness", i.e. utility functions that operate on pointers and where the return type should technically get const from the argument?
(strchr is the most obvious, but in general most search/lookup type functions are like this...)
Add to clarify: the current prototype for strchr is
char *strchr(const char *s, int c);
Which just drops the "const", so you might end up writing to read-only memory without any warning. Ideally there'd be something like:
maybe_const_out char *strchr(maybe_const_in char *s, int c);
So the return value gets const from the input argument. Maybe this can be done with _Generic? That kinda seems like the "cannonball at sparrows" approach though :/
(Also you'd need to change the official strchr() definition...)
(strchr is the most obvious, but in general most search/lookup type functions are like this...)
Add to clarify: the current prototype for strchr is
Which just drops the "const", so you might end up writing to read-only memory without any warning. Ideally there'd be something like: So the return value gets const from the input argument. Maybe this can be done with _Generic? That kinda seems like the "cannonball at sparrows" approach though :/ (Also you'd need to change the official strchr() definition...)