On 2025-03-19 13:05, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
Please comment on the subthread where Bruno mentioned a number of places in gnulib and gettext where you use strtoul(3). I found there a few bugs, plus some ways to just simplify with strtou(3).
I looked at the Gnulib commentary in <https://lore.kernel.org/liba2i/jx4664ishtl34eg2npdrv5fkfdiczqnlq3vjuacjrupjvh377x@gddcftzgwmfq/>, as I assume that's what you're talking about. (I don't hack on gettext and will leave Bruno to comment on that.)
For Gnulib, I didn't see any bugs in the three areas mentioned.The patch suggested to lib/getaddrinfo.c doesn't fix any bugs that I can see, and needs an additional wrapper to work anyway, which is introducing complexity.
The patch suggested to lib/nproc.c is merely a minor clarity / performance improvement (it removes three instructions), and does not fix any bugs. Likewise for the patch to lib/omp-init.c. And these improvements (where the code mistakenly worried about endptr == NULL) fix a mistake that one could make with the proposed strtoi API, so I don't see strtoi helping there.
But thanks for the clarity / speedup idea; I installed a patch into Gnulib here:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=2835ca01722fcd41761383ef289d19797b13b2e8
> In particular, use a functional style, with > no side effects (no pointers-to-results). Just return the result you want, > as a struct, and keep the struct simple. Two struct components should > suffice: the scanned numeric value and a success/error indicator.That's going to complicate usage significantly.
Please try it and see. You might be surprised at how clean and efficient functional programming can be, if done right. Admittedly C doesn't always make it easy.