Re: error reporting

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2014-04-08 at 20:15 +0000, Rob Juergens wrote:
> Note that in Unix, vsnprintf() returns the TOTAL number of chars
> needed (add 1 for the null). If the output would overflow the buffer,
> then you would get a return value larger than the specified buffer
> size.
> 
> In Windoze,  vsnprintf() will return -1 if the buffer would be
> overflowed, and there is no indication of what length the buffer must
> be.

Yes, I'm well aware of the difference in behavior, unfortunately :-/.

> Microsoft is *not* going to change this, since that would break
> who-knows how many existing programs that depend on that behavior.

Well, that's a shame: if true MSVC will never be a conforming compiler
implementation for C++11 or any newer C++ standard.

The C++11 standard clearly states that the return value of the
(standard) vsnprintf() function must be the "number of characters that
would have been written if [the buffer size] had been sufficiently
large, not counting the terminating null character".  This is basically
the exact text for the C99 standard, imported into the C++11 standard.

Microsoft is on the C++ standards committee and they certainly were
aware of this, so my hope is they have a plan to allow for both "legacy"
implementations and "conforming" implementations.

> Attached are 2013 files and updated other files

I'm really not excited about the prospect of continuing to add new
project files every year for each new version of Visual Studio.  Isn't
there any sort of backward-compatibility that allows the older files to
work in newer Visual Studio releases?

Also, is there any way to get these project files out of the root
directory?  I'd be a lot more sanguine about them if we could put them
into the "w32" subdirectory, or in an "msvc" subdirectory or something
and get them out of the way.

To my mind the only reason to ship Visual Studio project files with GNU
make is if there are people who want to develop and enhance GNU make
itself, and who want to use Visual Studio to do it.  For people who just
want to build GNU make on Windows and use the result for other projects,
surely it's easier to just run a .bat build file or maybe use an nmake
file to build make.exe; that's all you need.  Visual Studio seems like
real overkill for that.