Post #2239432

@bert_hubert@fosstodon.org Its this kind of shit I want to wave at people when they act like UNIX, C and the "old way" was some kind of perfection that should be worshiped, and that any *new* API or language design is unnecessary and perverts the "Unix Philosophy" rather than seeing Unix as a hacky work-in-progress, made by different people with very different preferences and ideas, that got solidified and standardized mid development with parts from divergent forks with different visions. This is an example of a half-baked API that works well enough, but I think most people would agree that returning -1 on error is not a sufficiently rich error path, a stopgap for simpler machines from a simpler era, and this kind of magic incantation needed to actually _use_ it is the kind of thing that very few people would intuit when using the API, so is probably a source of infrequent bugs due to "incorrect" usage.