Do you use the TR 24731 ‘safe’ functions? [closed]

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I have been a vocal critic of these TRs since their inception (when it was a single TR) and would never use them in any of my software. They mask symptoms instead of addressing causes and it is my opinion that if anything they will have a negative impact on software design as they provide a false sense of security instead of promoting existing practices that can accomplish the same goals much more effectively. I am not alone, in fact I am not aware of a single major proponent outside of the committee developing these TRs.

I use glibc and as such know that I will be spared having to deal with this nonsense, as Ulrich Drepper, lead maintainer for glibc, said about the topic:

The proposed safe(r) ISO C library
fails to address to issue completely.
… Proposing to make the life of a
programmer even harder is not going to
help. But this is exactly what is
proposed. … They all require more
work to be done or are just plain
silly.

He goes on to detail problems with a number of the proposed functions and has elsewhere indicated that glibc would never support this.

The Austin Group (responsible for maintaining POSIX) provided a very critical review of the TR, their comments and the committee responses available here. The Austin Group review does a very good job detailing many of the problems with the TR so I won’t go into individual details here.

So the bottom line is: I don’t use an implementation that supports or will support this, I don’t plan on ever using these functions, and I see no positive value in the TR. I personally believe that the only reason the TR is still alive in any form is because it is being pushed hard by Microsoft who has recently proved very capable of getting things rammed though standards committees despite wide-spread opposition. If these functions are ever standardized I don’t think they will ever become widely used as the proposal has been around for a few years now and has failed to garner any real community support.

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