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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

Good news in the article, apparently asprintf is scheduled for the next POSIX standard. I wonder how one sees what is in the next POSIX standard, it would inform my choices of what I use. I'll use something that works on all my platforms if it is headed to a standard, but usually not if it may head to oblivion.

Also open_memstream is POSIX 2008, now if it would just get into OS X…

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These functions are proposed for the next C standard. They are in part 2 of the bounds checking interface. The relevant proposal is n1337 'dynamic allocation functions'

  asprintf() 
  aswprintf()
  vaswprintf()
  fmemopen() 
  open_memstream() 
  open_wmemstream()

If you want this today on all (C89) platforms, GLib ships an embedded copy of gnulib and runs virtually everywhere.

gnulib is atrocious beyond belief though. I hear GLib tends to abort your process on OOM, though I haven't done my research on this library, so I would be careful using these to develop reliable software.

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