January 13, 2009

Not The Kind With Sand

The (almost) always entertaining Daily WTF has an article today about my favorite pair of standard C functions, setjmp and longjmp: If goto is considered harmful, then longjmp() should definitely be considered dangerous. As in, thermo-freakin-nuclear bomb dangerous. Fortunately, its complexity and frequency of use seem to be on par with that of a nuke, and most C developers have not brought it in their everyday. Most.

August 10, 2007

Nerd Inside Joke Of The Day

At work I’m doing some old school C programming, which made me think of the OS class I took at BU. Just for shits and giggles I looked up the man page for longjmp(). The best part of the page, by far, is the NOTES section: longjmp() and siglongjmp() make programs hard to understand and maintain. If possible an alternative should be used. Understatement of the millennium (and the last millennium too). Read more