Do you use the TR 24731 'safe' functions?

I have been a vocal critic of these TRs since their inception (when it was a single TR) and would never use them in any of my software. They mask symptoms instead of addressing causes and it is my opinion that if anything they will have a negative impact on software design as they provide a false sense of security instead of promoting existing practices that can accomplish the same goals much more effectively. I am not alone, in fact I am not aware of a single major proponent outside of the committee developing these TRs.

I use glibc and as such know that I will be spared having to deal with this nonsense, as Ulrich Drepper, lead maintainer for glibc, said about the topic:

The proposed safe(r) ISO C library fails to address to issue completely. ... Proposing to make the life of a programmer even harder is not going to help. But this is exactly what is proposed. ... They all require more work to be done or are just plain silly.

He goes on to detail problems with a number of the proposed functions and has elsewhere indicated that glibc would never support this.

The Austin Group (responsible for maintaining POSIX) provided a very critical review of the TR, their comments and the committee responses available here. The Austin Group review does a very good job detailing many of the problems with the TR so I won't go into individual details here.

So the bottom line is: I don't use an implementation that supports or will support this, I don't plan on ever using these functions, and I see no positive value in the TR. I personally believe that the only reason the TR is still alive in any form is because it is being pushed hard by Microsoft who has recently proved very capable of getting things rammed though sta

Do you use a library or compiler with support for the TR24731-1 functions? If so, which compiler or library and on which platform(s)?

Yes, Visual Studio 2005 & 2008 (for Win32 development obviously).

Did you uncover any bugs as a result of fixing your code to use these functions?

Sort of.... I wrote my own library of safe functions (only about 15 that we use frequently) that would be used on multiple platforms -- Linux, Windows, VxWorks, INtime, RTX, and uItron. The reason for creating the safe functions were:

• We had encountered a large number of bugs due to improper use of the standard C functions.
• I was not satisfied with the information passed into or returned from the TR functions, or in some cases, their POSIX alternatives.

Once the functions were written, more bugs were discovered. So yes, there was value in using the functions.

Which functions provide the most value?

Safer versions of vsnprintf, strncpy, strncat.

Are there any that provide no value or negative value?

fopen_s and similar functions add very little value for me personally. I'm OK if fopen returns NULL. You should always check the return value of the function. If someone ignores the return value of fopen, what is going to make them check the return value of fopen_s? I understand that fopen_s will return more specific error information which can be useful in some contexts. But for what I'm working on, this doesn't matter.

Are you planning to use the library in the future?

We are using it now -- inside our own "safe" library.

Are you tracking the TR24731-2 work at all?

No.