> GNU software is also often very bloated and overengineered, and often found in critical places like glibc.
My memory is rusty - aren't those features "protected" against accidental usage, with something like "#define GNU_SOURCE" needed before you include the headers? Or is that protection insufficient?
> Their coding styles are highly questionable and I disagree with a lot of their design decisions.
On the coding styles I agree. On the design decisions... I realize that this is a big and hard question (and that answering it probably amounts to another blog post) but could you please explain that, maybe with an example?
They are "protected", yes, but their mere presence encourages people to use them. There's no reason to use asprintf, but glibc makes it available so some software uses it. That software is now non-portable.
>On the coding styles I agree. On the design decisions... I realize that this is a big and hard question (and that answering it probably amounts to another blog post) but could you please explain that, maybe with an example?
Maybe in a blog post someday.
I think asprintf is useful - it replaces an ugly "malloc-realloc-snprintf-loop"...
On exposing non-portable functions/features:
- OpenBSD does it (pledge)
- Freebsd/NetBSD do it (kqueue)
- ... I'm certain other systems do too
> Maybe in a blog post someday.
I would like to read that. :-)
[edit: formatting...]
Well, implement it yourself then. It's really not hard to live without, though. I don't know about this loop you're talking about but I just do this:
int len = snprintf(NULL, 0, "fmt", ...);
char *foo = malloc(len + 1);
snprintf(foo, len, "fmt", ...);
Yeah, let's reinvent the wheel anytime something is not available on all platforms in the world, wether or not you intent to target them...
If I target GNU systems, why can't I use GNU features ? If people really want to port my code, let them do so.
Thanks for that :-)