You would think converting floats to and from strings was a solved problem by now...

I'm surprised noone ever looked at that code --- even when writing it --- and thought "how long can a %f get?" I've been writing C for a long time and that's just something which comes naturally, being ingrained into memory since the beginning. If I see a fixed-size buffer I will always question whether it's big enough (and also if it's perhaps even too big.)

The "psychology" around buffer overflows has always seemed strange to me; a real-world analogy is someone who has no idea how big his car is, finds a parking spot that "looks big enough", and just rams it in without a second thought, sometimes crashing into the surroundings. Not many people would do that in the real world. Yet countless programmers seemingly can't get something simple like this right?

Edit: downvoters, care to state your case?