• mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
    ·
    5 months ago

    glibc is great, but holy shit the source code is obscured into oblivion, so hard to understand, with hardcoded optimizations, and compiler optimizations. I understand how difficult is to find vulnerabilities. A bit sad that the only C lib truely free software is so hard to actually read its code or even contribute to it.

    • leopold@lemmy.kde.social
      ·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      For what it's worth, glibc is very much performance-critical, so this shouldn't be a surprise. Any possible optimization is worth it.

      There are a ton of free software libc implementations outside of glibc. I think most implementations of libc are free software at this point. There's Bionic, the BSD libcs, musl, the Haiku libc, the OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana libc, Newlib, relibc, the ToaruOS libc, the SerenityOS libc and a bunch more. Pretty sure Wine/ReactOS also have free implementations of the Windows libc.