I'm sorry if that seems dense to you. That's pretty much beginner C stuff; after years of writing it, its absolutely transparent to an experienced programmer. I'm astonished at the vitriol; every language takes some learning whether it be lambdas or annotations or declarations or whatever; if it seems opaque to you, perhaps some reading is in order.
And yet we started off discussing a serious bug in libc discovered in exactly that kind of code. That's the libc in Android!! My argument is that the extra cognitive overhead of digesting needless complexity leads to the original authors and reviewers of the code to miss other obvious bugs.
I'm astonished at the vitriol
I'm sorry if my straightforward and respectful response to your dismissive and patronizing remarks sounds vitriolic to you.
Because somebody is writing the libc code says nothing about their skill; just the opposite because who wants to be in charge of reimplementing tired old library routines? The new guy I would imagine.
This bug is simply a failure to test. Where was the trivial automated unit test for this library routine? Never written I imagine.
Reminds me of another buggy library I had to work with - the Linux c runtime. I was porting to a risc processor oh ten years ago. Something was wrong with the memcpy routine. So I wrote a unit test. A very thorough unit test. Found 12(!) bugs before I was through.
Test was: copy from aligned source + (0..128) to aligned destination + (0..128) length (0..128). Simple triple loop. Anybody could have written it. Nobody ever had.
This is not a C problem, or an Android problem. Its an industry problem. Intel shipped a Pentium processor once upon a time that couldn't divide by 10.
