On Fri, Dec 14, 2018 at 05:38:33PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > * Rich Felker: > > > This is all useless (and wrong since tv_nsec is required to have type > > long as part of C and POSIX, regardless of ILP32-vs-LP64; that's a bug > > in glibc's x32). > > We should be able to fix standards if they prove unworkable in practice. > In my opinion, if standards require complex solutions where an obvious > and simple solution exists, then standards are wrong. The requirement doesn't mandate complex solutions. There's nothing complex about tv_nsec being long. long is the smallest type that C guarantees to be large enough to store the range of values, which is forever fixed and can't grow (because the definition of "nano" prefix is fixed :). The type has been long ever since the structure was introduced, and its being long means that there's lots of (correct!) code using %ld (e.g. ".%.9ld" to format results as a decimal without using floating point approximations) to print it. There might also be code taking pointers to it to pass to functions, etc. The only reason a "complex" need arises is that Linux did something horribly wrong here, ignoring the specified type, when introducing an obscure subarch that almost nobody uses. This kind of mistake is becoming a theme in Linux (see also: msghdr). Application authors should not have to pay the price for fixing this by retrofitting yet another silly type like "snseconds_t" or something into programs to accommodate the mistakes of x32. Rich
