From: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de>
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2016 09:36:25 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] compat: add qsort_s()
Message-ID: <2203c696-3a86-626b-c516-285daef15022@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <20161212195703.nmljhwwmrn56gbyd@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Am 12.12.2016 um 20:57 schrieb Jeff King:
> On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 08:51:14PM +0100, René Scharfe wrote:
>
>> It's kinda cool to have a bespoke compatibility layer for major platforms,
>> but the more I think about it the less I can answer why we would want that.
>> Safety, reliability and performance can't be good reasons -- if our fallback
>> function lacks in these regards then we have to improve it in any case.
>
> There may be cases that we don't want to support because of portability
> issues. E.g., if your libc has an assembly-optimized qsort() we wouldn't
> want to replicate that.

Offloading to GPUs might be a better example; I don't know of a libc 
that does any of that, though (yet).

> I dunno. I am not that opposed to just saying "forget libc qsort, we
> always use our internal one which is consistent, performant, and safe".
> But when I suggested something similar for our regex library, I seem to
> recall there were complaints.

Well, I'm not sure how comparable they are, but perhaps we can avoid 
compat code altogether in this case.  Patch coming in a new thread.

René