RE: Administrivia: List Announcement

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To: "'Gustavo Scotti'" <gscotti@axur.com.br>
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2002 04:57:59 -0400

        Agreed up to here. Freeing a buffer that is not NULL terminated is
fine, you're right. The first example is 'just a bug'. The second one is a
security risk and a bug.

> I don't think this is a shabby way to copy a string. An
> hipotetical char = 16 bits, not even your malloc is misused,
> like your for is incoherent. Yes, the correct loop would be i
> < SIZE. Ops can be reduced if your compiler could optmize it.
> If you force an arch based optmization (like the one you
> proposed), it is totally arch dependent.
>

        It's not as arch specific as you think. Provided you are using 8 bit
character strings, which is sort of implied as I read it, then it is pretty
bad. Take a look at the implementation of strcpy in a good CRT, it should be
much smarter than this loop. Yes good compilers can optimize this, but you
can express that optimization in vanilla C, which prevents the compiler from
having to; premature optimization may be the root of all evil, but immature
optimization follows closely on it's heels. The for loop string copy is a
good example of trying to be smarter than you really are; calling strncpy is
often faster.

        Copying a string 32bits at a time rather than 8 is just better. Yes
if we switch to wide-char strings on Windows, for example, it will break,
but so will code that uses strncpy. But we digress into nit-picking and the
sort of subjective coding debate that never ends...

Cheers,
~ol

• Previous message: Shafik Yaghmour: "Re: Administrivia: List Announcement"
• Maybe in reply to: Dave McKinney: "Administrivia: List Announcement"
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