• mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    34
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    9 months ago

    glibc is great, but holy shit 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.

    • leopold@lemmy.kde.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      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.

      • Drito@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        Glibc has extensions that fragment compatibility. If Glibc is replaced by another libc, some apps prints an error, or don’t work. I noticed that on Alpine.

    • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Eventually it’ll be easier to create a compatible drop-in replacement than maintain the decades old code, if it isn’t already

      • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        9 months ago

        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.

        • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          9 months ago

          Wayland is not a drop-in replacement tho. It’s like if glibc developers declared it obsolete and presented a “replacement” that has a completely different API and has 1/100 of glibc functionality and a plugin interface. And then all the dozens of Linux distros have to write all the plugins from scratch to add back missing functionality and do it together in perfect cooperation so that they remain compatible with each other.