166
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
166 points (95.1% liked)
Linux
47223 readers
892 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Returning error codes in-band is the reason for a significant percentage of C bugs and security holes when the return value is used without checking. Something like Rust's Result type that forces you to distinguish the two cases is much better design here. And no, you are not working with a whole language ecosystem of "sufficiently disciplined programmers" so that nobody ever forgets to check a return value.
Not to mention that errno is just a very broken design in the times of modern thread and event systems, signals, interrupts and all kinds of other ways to produce race conditions and overwrite the errno value before it is checked.
errno is not shared between threads. Also:
There does not add more race conditions because signal handlers execute in one of regular threads. In single-threaded program signals are functions that can be called by OS at any point of execution, but they do not execute at same time with threads.