logoalt Hacker News

kccqzy • last Tuesday at 4:15 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

You don’t do that by accident. Fixed-width strings are thoroughly outdated and unusual. Your mental model of them is very different from regular C strings.

Replies

arka2147483647 • last Tuesday at 5:42 PM

Sadly, all the bug trackers are full of bugs relating to char*. So you very much do those by accident. And in C, fixed width strings are not in any way rare or unusual. Go to any c codebase you will find stuff like:

   char buf[12];
   sprintf(buf, "%s%s", this, that); // or
   strcat(buf, ...) // or
   strncpy(buf, ...) // and so on..
➕ show 2 replies
ninkendo • last Tuesday at 5:41 PM

The mental model doesn’t matter, it’s the compiler’s model that is going to bite you. If the compiler doesn’t reject it, it will happen eventually.