Re: C11 bounds checking interfaces in glibc?

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012, Andi Kleen wrote:

> 
> Are there any plans to support the C11 bounds checking interfaces (Appendix K)
> in glibc? I don't see anything in git.
> 
> I'm mainly interested in the string functions.

I don't think there are any plans; see 
<http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2011-12/msg00066.html> for what I 
said about them and 
<http://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2011-12/msg00064.html> for what 
Roland said.  In essence, they are rather a mess and *most* of them (other 
than the reentrant functions) probably are not desirable for use in new 
code - but there are probably uses for them for compiling some existing 
bodies of code that have been retrofitted with them.

I don't know to what extent it might make sense or be possible to put 
these functions in a separate library from libc or indeed in an add-on, 
though I suspect they are a bit too closely tied to other functions for 
that.

Generally I think support for the various ISO C extensions and optional 
features adding functions is a good thing - sometimes in add-ons where 
appropriate.  (libdfp is an add-on - but libc still needs scanf hooks 
interfaces to be added so that all the decimal floating-point support is 
possible in an add-on.)  But obviously this depends on implementation 
effort - some of these extensions are not exactly small projects to 
support.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com