Re: mkstemp

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

On Sat, 15 Apr 2006, Lisa Parratt wrote:

> Why not use neither, and implement a nice predictable function that 
> does exactly what you want, rather than relying on the highly 
> unreliable "standard" C library?

The C libraries in use on most desktop platforms are mature and 
reliable. (If they contain bugs, report them and yea verily they shall 
be fixed, although I realise this doesn't help immediately.) If you're 
using an embedded system, you can often replace the vendor's C library 
(and/or entire toolchain) with something tried and tested like dietlibc 
or ulibc. Prefer vendors who ship source, so you can fix rather than 
kludge.

Besides, mkstemp is something one is unlikely ever to implement (or even 
worse, use) correctly, at least on a multi-tasking system. Creating 
temporary files is a hard problem, as witness the number of different 
functions for doing so on a typical POSIX-based system. Creating a 
temporary filename without a file is simply not possible on such 
systems: you always have a race condition.

Personally, I'd rather the Lua authors concentrated on providing a 
programming language than an OS, and I suspect in any case that's what 
they're going to do. Lua's using and not reimplementing the standard[1] 
C library is one reason it's so versatile.

Reuben

[1] I assume your quotation of "standard" is meant to mean that many 
libcs are not, not that there is no standard, right? :)

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