Re: glibc's snprintf is a pig; fix or replace ?

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Jim,

On 3 Nov 2010, at 16:13, Jim Meyering wrote:
> glibc's snprintf is next-to-useless in an application that must accept
> arbitrary inputs and/or arbitrary format strings, and that cannot afford
> to allocate 2GiB of heap.

Many years ago I wrote a complete reimplementation of the printf functions,
and with some help from Bruce Korb and Paolo Bonzini it ended up in both
autogen and GNU smalltalk.

    https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/libsnprintfv/

We already proposed cannibalizing it into an abstract string type, a
self-extending string type and then the self-contained *printf* 
implementation built atop those for inclusion in gnulib:

    http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-02/msg00221.html

I (and I believe others) would still like to see this happen, but as is
usual for such things I believe the main thing holding it back is a lack
of time from concerned parties, and overcoming the inertia to get it
started.  Your message adds another good reason to the list of why doing
this would be useful...

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (address@hidden)

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