Hi Joseph, > Date: 2026-07-31 22:42:00+0000 > From: Joseph Myers <[email protected]> > > On Sat, 1 Aug 2026, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > > > > When an API has been in <string.h> since 1989, that means documenting > > > <string.h> as the main location for that API - not some other location > > > one > > > person thinks is better and that most of the community has never heard of. > > > > FWIW, the APIs have been in <memory.h> since 1986 in 4.3BSD, and in > > System V they go back further to 1983. > > In other words, they were in that header for 6 years, and it's been > implicitly obsolescent by virtue of the standard choice for the 37 years > since then.
Yes. And I'm trying to revert the implicit obsolescence. Obsolescence isn't a one-way process. Sometimes, evidence shows up, and the obsolete feature must come back for $reasons. FWIW, memccpy(3) was resurrected in C23 back from a cold death it had been suffering since forever. And that was less justified. > Standards involve accepting agreed compromises that might not have been > your first choice, rather than endlessly relitigating past disputes > without new evidence or changed circumstances. In this case, the choice > of where to put the functions in C89 was an agreed compromise that > implicitly obsoleted the previous location, and should have put an end to > any arguments that <string.h> was a bad location for those functions in > the absence of clear new evidence. I agree that it wasn't necessarily obvious back then that the movement to <string.h> was bad. While I blame the C89 Committee for other stuff they should have been aware of, this isn't one of them. But now in 2026, we see that there have some been problems. > We have plenty of clear evidence for > confusion about strn*; we don't about mem*. Thanks! Now we have a common ground. Indeed, while there might be a minimal problem with mem*() --the fact of not starting by str makes them less misused--, the important problem is strn*(). The solution of moving both mem*() and strn*() to <memory.h> and leaving just str*() in <string.h> is a consistent one, because <string.h> then remains strictly for string APIs, and <memory.h> is for the rest of byte handling. It wouldn't be reasonable to move strn*() to <memory.h>, and then leave mem*() in <string.h>, of course. Similarly, it wouldn't be reasonable to more strncpy/cat() to <memory.h> and leave the rest of strn*() and all of mem*() in <string.h>. This movement, while a bit massive, is consistent and self-explicative. That is, the only reasonable way to move strncpy/cat() is to also move strn*() and mem*(). Cheers, Alex > > -- > Joseph S. Myers > [email protected] > -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>
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