On Tue, Jun 9, 2026, at 10:28 AM, Joel Sherrill wrote: > One of the RTEMS.org GSoC projects is bringing the safelibc > (https://github.com/rurban/safeclib) to RTEMS. This library > implements the C11 and later Annex K Bounds Checking functions.
I can't make you stop, but I urge you to reconsider whether this project is actually a good idea. The Annex K functions do not actually do the job they were meant to do -- "dropping in" the Annex K equivalents of each core C runtime function, *at best*, only converts bugs into different bugs. Continuing to put effort into Annex K encourages the erroneous belief that a program written using exclusively these functions is somehow "safer" than a program that uses the traditional functions. In all cases where it is genuinely impossible to use a core C library function without the program having a bug, there is an existing alternative within core C that can be used. It's especially important to disabuse *students* of this erroneous belief because several influential sources (notably, Microsoft's "Visual Studio" tools, which are very likely to be a student's first exposure to C these days) push said belief on students. I would not have accepted this GSoC project in the first place. That said ... > I would appreciate any pointers to what is required of a library to > support being built multilib. A simple example would be even better. ... Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the Autotools have any built- in support for multilib builds. The usual workaround is to have a higher- level Makefile or build script that invokes the library build several times with different CFLAGS, prefix, etc. If you don't want your student to blow a huge amount of time and effort on build system issues, I would go with that approach. For this specific task, [email protected] is probably a better place to get advice than autoconf@. zw
