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It would seem that the C standard library is a collection of diverse functions that pretty much just ended up in the standard by tradition or "accident", rather than through some careful plan or ra...
#1: Initial revision
by
Lundin
·
2022-04-05T08:06:34Z (over 2 years ago)
Which functions in the C standard library must always be avoided?
It would seem that the C standard library is a collection of diverse functions that pretty much just ended up in the standard by tradition or "accident", rather than through some careful plan or rationale. During standardization of ANSI/ISO 9899:1990, they just grabbed a bunch of existing library functions in Unix and made them standard. Some of them, like the notorious `gets` are even broken by design. Clearly a lot of them were invented in a time long before things like software security or even compiler optimizations were invented. Or in case of the notorious `strncpy`, from a time before null terminated strings were invented. Is there a complete list of functions in the standard library that should _always_ be avoided in any C program? Ideally covering ISO 9899:1990 to 202x versions of the language.