On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 05:26:43PM +0100, René Scharfe wrote: > The function qsort_s() was introduced with C11 Annex K; it provides the > ability to pass a context pointer to the comparison function, supports > the convention of using a NULL pointer for an empty array and performs a > few safety checks. > > Add an implementation based on compat/qsort.c for platforms that lack a > native standards-compliant qsort_s() (i.e. basically everyone). It > doesn't perform the full range of possible checks: It uses size_t > instead of rsize_t and doesn't check nmemb and size against RSIZE_MAX > because we probably don't have the restricted size type defined. For > the same reason it returns int instead of errno_t. Hmm. So it sounds like qsort_r(), but with the NULL-is-empty magic. But we already are OK without the latter (and can emulate it easily). Would it make sense to do: #if defined(HAVE_QSORT_S) /* huzzah, use the system-native qsort_s */ #elif defined(HAVE_QSORT_R) int git_qsort_s(void *b, size_t n, size_t s, int (*cmp)(const void *, const void *, void *), void *ctx) { if (!n) return 0; if (!b || !cmp) return -1; qsort_r(b, n, s, cmp, ctx); return 0; } #else /* fallback implementation as your patch does */ #endif To make matters more fun, apparently[1] there are multiple variants of qsort_r with different argument orders. _And_ apparently Microsoft defines qsort_s, but it's not quite the same thing. But all of that can be dealt with by having more specific flags (HAVE_GNU_QSORT_R, etc). It just seems like we should be able to do a better job of using the system qsort in many cases. -Peff [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39560773/different-declarations-of-qsort-r-on-mac-and-linux/39561369