[RFC] [PATCH] Support explicit_bzero, memset_s, memzero_explicit, or similar.

Paul Eggert eggert@cs.ucla.edu
Tue Dec 23 02:22:00 GMT 2014


Rich Felker wrote:
> I don't recall any such consensus,

Well, to be fair I didn't call it a consensus, only a "most favored suggestion". 
  I agree it didn't have consensus.

> there's a huge
> difference in adding an interface that conflicts with he requriements
> of Annex K (even if glibc doesn't want to support Annex K now or for
> the forseeable future), and adding one which simply does not support
> all the 'features' specified in Annex K but matches the semantics for
> the features it does support.

That goes only so far.  Suppose the spec for plain traditional strcpy were in 
Annex K, and glibc supplied a strcpy implementation that mostly worked, except 
it failed to copy the trailing null byte.  I doubt whether users would be 
satisfied with the justification "well, this doesn't *conflict* with the spec, 
and it's *partial* support for the standard".  Similarly for a memset_s that 
fails to throw an exception if you invoke it with invalid arguments.



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