Move Parrot to C99 (subset)

Gerd Pokorra gp at zimt.uni-siegen.de
Thu Dec 30 09:33:17 UTC 2010


I think the most C99 standards will work on all PLATFORMS where Parrot
is used.

1++


-- Gerd


Am Donnerstag, den 30.12.2010, 03:11 +0100 schrieb Andrew Whitworth:
> Parrot makes extensive use of the function snprintf for buffer-safe
> string writes. Unfortunately, snprintf is part of the C99 standard and
> officially Parrot uses C89 only. The workaround that Parrot uses is to
> #define the identifier snprintf to the function Parrot_secret_snprintf
> in src/misc.c. Unfortunately Parrot_secret_snprintf is functionally
> identical to sprintf, not snprintf. Even though we call
> "snprintf(...)", on some systems it uses Parrot_secret_snprintf, which
> does not do bounds checking and may corrupt memory.
> 
> On 64-bit windows systems with MSVC, we need to define INTVAL to "long
> long" to get a 64-bit value. Unfortunately, the data type "long long"
> (and associated machinery like the standard library functions strtoll,
> etc) are C99 only. This causes known problems in IMCC on certain
> systems where we cannot use 64-bit numeric literals because IMCC uses
> strtol instead of strtoll on those systems.
> 
> I would like to start the discussion about Parrot moving to C99. I
> think there is a lot of benefit to such a move, not just the two
> things I mentioned above.
> 
> Of course, some systems like MSVC do not implement the complete C99
> standard, and there's no reason we need to use all of it. I'm
> perfectly happy using the subset of C99 that is supported by MSVC. We
> already use the subset of C89 that C++ compilers support, because we
> are always careful to build on g++ even though it's more strict than a
> C89 compiler is in some cases. There's no reason we can't continue to
> use a highly portable subset of C99 that includes the features we
> already use or want to use.
> 
> MSVC does have support for snprintf and long long. I suggest we make
> those things "official" parts of our repertoire, and require them in
> all supported platforms.
> 
> As chromatic once said "HELLO FROM THE 21ST CENTURY PLEASE JOIN US THE
> WATER IS FINE"
> 
> --Andrew Whitworth
> 
> --Andrew Whitworth
> _______________________________________________
> http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev




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