RE: use of %n in genmodes.c causes trouble on Vista

[Danny Smith <dannysmith at clear dot net dot nz>]

Ian Lance Taylor
Friday, 8 June 2007 1:52 a.m.
> 
> At the very least there should be a compiler option for standard
> conformant behaviour in this area.  I didn't see one in the MSDN docs.
> I would say that gets is much more dangerous than %n in printf, but
> presumably Microsoft does not disable gets.
> 

The MSVCRT version of printf is non-conformant in several ways. In
addition to the new '%n' behaviour, there is the old problems with the
requirement to use 'I64' format flag  in place of 'll',  failure to
handle long double, non-C99-conformant return value for vsnprintf.  I
believe that thef first two of these are represented by open GCC
Bugzilla PR's.

A GCC target option (say, -malt-ISO-printf) for mingw that causes calls
to printf family to be mapped to a mingw_printf, mingw_snprintf, etc  is
one possibilty.  I have an experimntal a ISO-C99 compliant
mingw_vsnprintf that I was planning to contribute to mingw's libmingex.a
runtime extension library.   The main reason for writing this was to
allow long double output in libstdc++ and libgfortran. Wrapping that in
_set_printf_count_output (or adding a ctor that calls
_set_printf_count_output to a new startfile object) if we are using
Vista's MSVCRT.dll would avoid this problem in genmodes. 

Although, the alternate versions of *printf could be enabled in other
ways, having a compiler switch take care of it would  be nice.

Danny



> Ian
>