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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

He was a jerk, but often he had a reason for his abusiveness. Was the reason in this case valid?

The question is: Is string truncation a good solution when the strings you have are unexpectedly long? Like, it's probably ok in a lot of cases, and once you start using these functions, it's very tempting to use them almost everywhere... but truncating "Attack at dawn on Friday" to "Attack at dawn" could be a disaster as well.

On the other hand, his recommendation to always know string lengths and use memcpy didn't really become common practice over the last 20+ years either, so I'm not sure it was worth all the arguing.

At this point, I'm kind of joining the camp of "C has proven to be too bug-prone for most organizations to use safely and therefore we should all go to Rust".

I suspect the eventual end result is major compilers start implementing a "fat pointer" string ABI for internal translation units (decaying to char * at the edge where necessary) and people start turning that on.

> On the other hand, his recommendation to always know string lengths and use memcpy didn't really become common practice over the last 20+ years either, so I'm not sure it was worth all the arguing.

It hasn't become common practice in C. But other languages (like JavaScript or Python) have become hugely popular, and don't use null-terminated strings.

Even languages in C's niche encode strings as pointer + length, like Rust.

It has in the sense that people allocate strings much more than using fixed-size, stack-allocated arrays.

Modern C uses things like glib's GString, which (in addition to keeping the NUL terminator) track the length and can resize the underlying memory. And people also use a lot more asprintf instead of strcpy and strcat.

> On the other hand, his recommendation to always know string lengths and use memcpy didn't really become common practice over the last 20+ years either

It was the way plenty of languages from the 70s stored their strings, including such popular ones as BASIC.

The second part "and therefore we should all go to Rust" does not follow necessarily from the first. Maybe the reason not everybody is gone to Rust is that it lacks something. Maybe we will all go somewhere else.

It lacks developer ergo omics, for me personally.

Source is for humans to read, it shouldn't look like alphabet soup for the idiomatic cases.

> but often he had a reason for his abusiveness

There is never, ever, under any circumstances, a reason to be abusive.

Not really; he was frequently a jerk right out of the starting gates for no particular reason. That quote is the initial reply to the proposed patch, and the only "reason" I see for the insults is to satisfy Drepper's own emotional needs. It's petty and pathetic.

This is very different from e.g. Torvalds who sometimes rants a bit after someone who he feels ought to know better screwed up. I'm not saying that's brilliant either, but I can be a lot more understanding when people are abrasive out of passion for their project after something went wrong.

Well, he does actually have a point. strlcpy is a faster (well, safer) horse than strncpy, but it's still a horse. We should not use horses as the main mode of transport anymore.

"Doctor, it hurts when I strcpy — so don't do that".

He's being a jerk about it, but I would not say that he doesn't have a point.

Merely "having a point" is not "a reason for his abusiveness". I think I "have a point" for almost any HN comment I post (or at least, I'd like to think so) and have just as much "reason" to be a jerk as Drepper had. This applies to most posts on HN.

Ah, true. I think I cross-read comments here. Sorry.

Mostly no. True, the C NUL-terminated string definition is bad, but it's baked into the API. You need some semi-sane way to work with it that isn't 'Everyone writes their own wrappers to memccpy' (some people will get that wrong - e.g. the Linux manpage stpecpy wrapper just begs for misuse, and it's what most initiate C programmers will see if they know enough to check manpages).

strlcpy may not be the best API, but it's sane enough and by now ubiquitous enough to deserve inclusion. Had glibc and others engaged we may have had a better API. Regardless, glibc should never have had such a long veto here.

No.

Yes.

Why?

People typically do not realize that it has a return value that is expensive to compute.

It's not any slower in the typical case where destination buffer is large enough to fit the source thing. And if that's not the case then we are most likely in a error case (either caller notices the truncation and decides to abort, or ignores the truncation and things may soon go boom), and not many people care about optimizing error paths.

Furthermore, when coders dont't have strlcpy() the alternatives are often even worse than strlcpy(): 1) They use strcpy() and have buffer overflows. 2) They use strncpy() which is slower than strlcpy() in the common (non truncating) case, and in the truncating case leave the string unterminated (thus segfault potential) 3) They use snprintf(dst, len, "%s", src); which is strictly slower than strlcpy()

Since the error path is the largest one (the string doesn’t fit…) it makes sense to bound its execution. I would not recommend the others FWIW for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

Why would you optimize for the error case and not the common case? You've already done an unbounded amount of work copying the string in from the network or wherever. If anybody cared that much, they wouldn't let the string get that long in the first place.

It can be appropriate to bound the runtime of certain components of a system while allowing looser constraints elsewhere. For example I would perhaps not want to do an O(n) string operation on a collection of strings even though the user would be pretty upset if they can’t paste infinite input into my app.

It's only as expensive as what you pass in. Joke's on you.

qsort is also only as expensive as what I pass in. If it did a bubble sort internally I would be pretty upset though.

What? snprintf is nothing like doing an O(n^2) computation when O(n log n) was expected.

Right, it’s more like O(m) when you probably wanted O(n).

Inefficiency probably doesn't need any comment (these functions traverse string twice instead of once). His argument that string length should be always known is correct in theory although not in practice.

Can you name a program that runs too slowly because it uses strlcpy?

You're looking at it wrong. strlcpy is defined to be slow in certain cases. The API requires it. Other interfaces may be slow today but can be improved in the future because they don't have a return value that is inconvenient. (Notably, memccpy today is typically a memchr followed by memcpy, since this is faster than a naive implementation. Obviously if it gets used more then it will get replaced with a single-pass, machine optimized implementation.)

As the top level comment was about knowing the length of a string: GTA Online's loading times were atrocious because of a null-terminated string.

Not really, more that the implementation of sscanf() is stupid and calls strlen() even though implementing sscanf() that doesn't require that is perfectly possible.

Instead of putting up with people constantly complaining how C is bad because of zero-terminated strings, we should better educate folks that there is absolutely zero reason why one has to rely on a NUL byte in-band signal. And APIs like sscanf() shouldn't be used beyond their historic purposes and there are easier ways to program.

C doesn't really "have" zero-terminated strings other than supporting them with string literals as well as having an atrocious "strings" library for historical reasons. C has storage and gives you the means to copy data around, that's it.

(Although I fully agree that the GTA issue can be seen as a bug in the implementation of sscanf()).

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