Even putting aside the ugliness of errno, this is pretty bad. I'm at the point with libc where I try to use as little of it as I can, though I'm not writing a lot of C these days

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signa11 4 hours ago | parent [-]

well, unless you are 'syscalling' someone else is doing it on your behalf.

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eptcyka 4 hours ago | parent [-]

More to libc than syscalls.

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PhilipRoman 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would say there are 3 broad classes of libc functions

1) functions that you cannot implement in portable C - syscalls, signals, ABI specific things like longjmp and setcontext

2) functions that you could implement by yourself in portable C, but they are expected to play nice with the rest of the system - a lot of POSIX user stuff, dns management, dlopen, all the nsswitch mess. Can't think of any standard C examples because of the extreme portability requirements of C. Maybe the locale stuff, although it's usefulness is dubious.

3) functions that are there for convenience and sometimes compiler special-casing, like math, str*, <db.h> stuff that was thankfully removed from glibc

Most of #3 should be ignored. #2 is optional, especially if your software is for end users and not packaged by a distro. Sometimes it's safer to ship your own MDNS implementation for example rather than hope that the distro has sane defaults.

	▲	eptcyka 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd much rather push for a world where we use a reasonable DNS/mDNS implementation on Linux rather than add to the zoo of bespoke variants. I have written code that tries to appease different DNS managers across different versions of them for different distros. We need to stop. Everyone believes that the common way of handling DNS is insane, so they create their own new way of doing it.

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signa11 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ofcourse. forgot the tongue-firmly-in-the-cheek disclaimer.