Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Greg Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > On the other hand, things like, getpwnam, strtok, etc have non-thread-safe > > APIs. They can never be made thread-safe. The *_r versions of these functions > > are standardized and required. If they don't exist then the platform simply > > does not support threads. > > This statement is simply false. A platform can build thread-safe > versions of those "unsafe" APIs if it makes the return values point > to thread-local storage. Some BSDs do it that way. Accordingly, any > simplistic "we must have _r to be thread-safe" approach is incorrect.
Except there are standards that describe things like strtok_r and such. If the OS doesn't have those standard functions at all then it probably doesn't have a thread-safe strtok. Moreover I was somewhat disturbed when I read that in port/thread.c. It seems rather a dramatic non-standard API change for these functions. It must break programs and libraries that expect these to have global state accessible from any thread. I suspect if I check back in the BSD mailing lists there were flamewars over this at the time. Generally I would prefer to use standards-dictated _r functions than depend on non-standard thread-local api extensions. Especially since many platforms have slow thread-local storage implementations. In any case I think I'm bowing out of this discussion. It seems like a simple matter has gotten way out of hand and I feel like a troll here. Sorry for fueling the confusion. -- greg ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])