there was discussion and the developers consensus was that they should all be gone.
i have soon removed all the strcpy and will proceed to remove all strcat as well.
the goal is to make ethereal more stable and also remove a lot of the memory leakage.
i think it is semisuccessful since so far this work has shown up
a significant number of array out of bounds and memory leakage.
this makes ethereal more stable.
after all of them are gone i will ask gerald to add a grep
-r to the buildbot to have it fail a build if it detects any
strcpy/strcat calls in the code, if new ones manage to sneak in.
g_snprintf() is slightly more computational expensive than strcpy but it is safer.
the performance bottlernecks lies elsewhere, not with g_snprintf.
for ethereal: using strcpy as a speed optimization is at best a pointless microoptimization
of code paths that were never taking up any noticeable time anyway.
perfromance regression at all by these changes.
In fact it might even become faster in some cases since many of those
strcpy() could when combined with the emem allocator be completely
replaced by just a simple pointer assignment.
i.e. i dont think it will really be noticeable.
another thing that needs to be done and will be completed eventually is
to remove every single static or automatic array and replace with emem
allocated memory.
in particular all automatic arrays should go as priority one, later also the global ones.
all help and patches to speed this up is more than welcome.
On 10/21/05, Rich Coe <Richard.Coe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
/* RANT on */
I think I missed the discussion where replacing strcpy with g_sprintf
was considered a good idea.
/* RANT off */
Can someone explain why it's better to call a function which does
- varargs
- parses a string for formatting chars
- calls strncpy!
- calls strlen!
is much better than a simple copy.
Thanks.
--
Rich Coe
richard.coe@xxxxxxxxxx
General Electric Healthcare Technologies
Global Software Platforms, Computer Technology Team
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