glibc is great, but holy removed the source code is obscured into oblivion, so hard to understand, with hardcoded optimizations, and compiler optimizations. I understand how difficult is to find vulnerabilities. A bit sad that the only C lib truely free software is so hard to actually read its code or even contribute to it.
For what it’s worth, glibc is very much performance-critical, so this shouldn’t be a surprise. Any possible optimization is worth it.
There are a ton of free software libc implementations outside of glibc. I think most implementations of libc are free software at this point. There’s Bionic, the BSD libcs, musl, the Haiku libc, the OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana libc, Newlib, relibc, the ToaruOS libc, the SerenityOS libc and a bunch more. Pretty sure Wine/ReactOS also have free implementations of the Windows libc.
Unlikely, unless you drop backwards compatibility for undefined behaviour. Unless you write a complete specification on it, you’ll end up either breaking old stuff, or slowly rebuilding the same problems.
glibc is great, but holy removed the source code is obscured into oblivion, so hard to understand, with hardcoded optimizations, and compiler optimizations. I understand how difficult is to find vulnerabilities. A bit sad that the only C lib truely free software is so hard to actually read its code or even contribute to it.
For what it’s worth, glibc is very much performance-critical, so this shouldn’t be a surprise. Any possible optimization is worth it.
There are a ton of free software libc implementations outside of glibc. I think most implementations of libc are free software at this point. There’s Bionic, the BSD libcs, musl, the Haiku libc, the OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana libc, Newlib, relibc, the ToaruOS libc, the SerenityOS libc and a bunch more. Pretty sure Wine/ReactOS also have free implementations of the Windows libc.
Eventually it’ll be easier to create a compatible drop-in replacement than maintain the decades old code, if it isn’t already
Unlikely, unless you drop backwards compatibility for undefined behaviour. Unless you write a complete specification on it, you’ll end up either breaking old stuff, or slowly rebuilding the same problems.