Re: strbuf API

Pierre Habouzit [off-list ref] writes:

  First, and that's the most important one: the buffer is always NUL
terminated, after its official "len". That means, in terms of strbuf
API, that "alloc" is always greater or equal to len+1 to be able to
store the ending NUL[1]. The advantages are obvious: you can pass the
buffer to any legacy C string function without any fear of read
overflow.

No overflow, but it's still potentially dangerous: if your strbuf
contains a '\0', you can't use any standard C string function.

For example, it would be very tempting to compare files with
"strcmp(buf1, buf2)", but that would just fail silently when the file
contains a '\0' byte.

I don't have a perfect solution, but having something explicit to say
"hey, I'm going to use a legacy C function" doesn't sound like a bad
idea.

  The other shortcoming is that you cannot tell the buffer "Hey, it's
very likely that you'll end up being _that_ long.

100% ACK on this point.

-- 
Matthieu