On 1. 6. 2026 23:07, Timofei Zhakov wrote:
On Mon, 01 Jun 2026 at 10:55 PM, Sean McBride
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 1 Jun 2026, at 16:46, Branko Čibej wrote:
> I prefer to just silence the brain-dead warning...
The warning is hardly brain-dead. sprintf() cannot be implemented
safely as it has no idea how big the buffer is. Memory overruns
are an infamous problem in C, and using sprintf() in 2026 is
madness IMNSHO.
OpenBSD has this same warning as macOS BTW.
Well, at the end of the day macos is in fact a BSD based system ;)
About memory safety, if we know the buffer has enough memory, it’s
okay. I completely agree with Branko. I believe in that snippet of
code, the function is used to format a number which realistically
could never exceed like 16 bytes.
5 actually, unless someone tweaks their locale to use numerals that
aren't in the ASCII subset, in which case it's 11 bytes but still 5
characters. Oh, it could be more if the locale uses Babylonian or Roman
numerals, I guess. I won't loose sleep over that remote possibility. I
don't expect Hammurabi's scribes will use Subversion any time in the
recent past.
I wouldn’t say you should avoid a specific function just because you
don’t like it or somebody on the internet says so. It’s fine whenever
you know what you’re doing.
That's really my problem. This warning caters to the lowest common
denominator and hurts everyone else. Fine, create a warning flag
specifically to note these kinds of issues. Apple did that very well
when they added -W64-to-32 to clang. Don't just "deprecate" a function
from the standard library that is not deprecated in the standard.
Whichever standard; if I'm using some POSIX functions, I don't expect
macOS or any other POSIX compliant system to complain that a function
was introduced in 2001 and I should use this other function that was
introduced in 2017 instead.
Then, some day it leads to Rust rewrites…
That'll come anyway, once the rusties have broken and thrown away all
other perfectly good code that has worked for the last 30 years.
-- Brane
