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Parse, Don’t Validate AKA Some C Safety Tips
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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Programming
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It is crazy to go to all of the extra trouble of dealing with an additional pointer for the
email_ttype, when it is just astructthat is a simple wrapper around achar *that could be passed around directly; a lot of the code in this example is just for dealing with having to manage the lifetime of the extraemail_tallocation, which seems like an unnecessary hoop to jump through.Isn't that sort of just the cost of doing business in C? It's a sparse language, so it falls to the programmer to cobble together more.
I do also think the concrete example of emails should be taken as a stand-in. Errors like swapping a parameter for an email application is likely not very harmful and detected early given the volume of email that exists. But in other, less fault-tolerant applications it becomes a lot more valuable.
C supports passing
structs around by value, so there was no need to allocate memory for it on the heap.