Re: Unixware Patch (Was: Re: Beta2 Tag'd and Bundled ...)

Tom Lane writes:
> Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> > On the other hand, things like, getpwnam, strtok, etc have non-thread-safe
> > APIs. They can never be made thread-safe. The *_r versions of these functions
> > are standardized and required. If they don't exist then the platform simply
> > does not support threads.
>
> This statement is simply false. A platform can build thread-safe
> versions of those "unsafe" APIs if it makes the return values point
> to thread-local storage. Some BSDs do it that way. Accordingly, any
> simplistic "we must have _r to be thread-safe" approach is
> incorrect.

No, it's not. Using the _r functions on such systems is BETTER because
the API is clean and the function can be implmented in a reentrant and
thread-safe fashion wuithout the need for thread local storage or
mutex locking.

L.