C is Brittle D is Plastic

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Apr 01, 2026 at 09:11:45AM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> (It's a rite of passage for every C programmer to develop their own,
> unique string package. Gawd knows I've probably coded up a couple
> dozen of them.)

Ugh, recently at a work project (> 2G LOC, majority of it in plain C) I
had to deal with cleaning up string code for compliance with security
standards.  Every module has its own way of working with strings; some
have fancy buffers with custom functions for building strings (and each
gratuitously incompatible with the others), others abuse snprintf and
strncat all over the place (hidden O(n^2) costs, anyone?), and yet
others outright strcat and sprintf (yes, the unsafe variants!) to a
buffer whose size is never checked that's passed around as a bare char*.
(It took some digging to discover that everyone uses the same underlying
64k buffer size. Still, extremely scary.)

A lot of boilerplate code exists purely to bridge the impedance
mismatch when passing strings between modules.

In this day and age, not having a standard API for string handling
across the entire language is inexcusable.  While flexibility is nice to
have, some things *need* to be standardized, otherwise it becomes
unmanageable with size and leads to needless boilerplate bloat.


T

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Democracy: The triumph of popularity over principle. -- C.Bond