qsort_r
Once upon a time, in 2002, the BSD folks had this genius plan: make the standard C qsort() function safe to use in reentrant code by creating qsort_r() and adding an argument (a pointer to pass to the comparison function). So they did, and it was good.
Five years later, in 2007, the GNU libc folks said to themselves “dang, those BSD guys are smart, I wish we had qsort_r()”. Then some idiot said: WAIT! We cannot simply use the same prototype as the BSD folks; they use an evil license! We can’t put that into GPL’d code! So the GNU libc folks solved the problem by reordering the arguments.
And now we have two, incompatible, widely published versions of qsort_r(), which both do the exact same thing: crash horribly if you use the wrong argument order.
<sigh>
Okay, here’s an alternate history:
… Then some lazy idiot said: WAIT! The existing qsort_r() is a poor design that requires a second implementation of qsort()! If we throw out compatibility with existing qsort_r() code, we can implement qsort() as a call to qsort_r() and no one will ever know!
<sigh>
Either way, we all lose.
(I have no argument with the alternate history point… but why’d you have to call it the exact same thing??? Call it qsort_gnu() or something! Make it easy to detect the difference!)
