I've been asked to maintain a large C++ codebase full of memory leaks. While poking around, I found out that we have a lot of buffer overflows that lead to the leaks (how it got this bad, I don't ever want to know). I've decided to removing the buffer overflows first, starting with the dangerous functions. What C/C++ functions that are...
I've been asked to maintain a large C++ codebase full of memory leaks. While poking around, I found out that we have a lot of buffer overflows that lead to the leaks (how it got this bad, I don't ever want to know). I've decided to removing the buffer overflows first. To make my bug-hunting easier, what tools can be used to check for bu...
Can someone please provide an implementation of a C function that gets invoked to dump the current stack? It's for a x86 linux system. It can be invoked in 2 ways: explicitly by another function, or after a crash (probably as a trap/int handler). The output can be either to the screen or to a file, as indicated by a parameter (handle)....
When I try to bind port 80 to a socket in c, i always get the error, that I don't have permission to use this port. is there an easy way to get this permission? ...
Hello, I'm writing an implementation of the XXTEA encryption algorithm that works on "streams", ie, can be used like: crypt mykey < myfile > output. One of the requisites is that it doesn't have access to the file at all (it only reads an fixed size block until find an EOF). The algorithm needs that the data bytes is multiple of 4, so i...
I'm writing a function that gets the path environment variable of a system, splits up each path, then concats on some other extra characters onto the end of each path. Everything works fine until I use the strcat() function (see code below). char* prependPath( char* exeName ) { char* path = getenv("PATH"); char* pathDeepCopy ...
I want to experiment with GCC whole program optimizations. To do so I have to pass all C-files at once to the compiler frontend. However, I use makefiles to automate my build process, and I'm not an expert when it comes to makefile magic. How should I modify the makefile if I want to compile (maybe even link) using just one call to GCC?...
I'm trying to embed a window from my process into the window of an external process using the SetParent function and have encountered a few problems that I'm hoping someone can help me out with. First off, here is an outline of what I am currently doing to embed my window into the application: HWND myWindow; //Handle to my application w...
In C/C++, how would I turn a blocking socket into a non blocking socket in both WinSocks and *nix; so that select() would work correctly. You can use the pre-processor for the platform specific code. ...
Hello, I've taken a few courses on C, C++ and data structures back a few years ago but never got to use that knowledge. Nothing advanced, just simple programming concepts that you'd learn in an introductory class. Now I've transferred into a Computer Science major as junior, and all of a sudden realized that I'll need that knowledge, a...
Context: A while ago, I stumbled upon this 2001 DDJ article by Alexandrescu: http://www.ddj.com/cpp/184403799 It's about comparing various ways to initialized a buffer to some value. Like what "memset" does for single-byte values. He compared various implementations (memcpy, explicit "for" loop, duff's device) and did not really find ...
Where can I find a list of all types of bsd style socket errors? ...
I have an application that writes to another application and needs to provide the date + timezone of the system. I have been using strftime with the %z argument to get the timezone, and it has been working very well on Linux. However, last week we decided to merge it to solaris just to find out that %z is not present. Someone suggested...
Does anyone have experience with LLVM, llvm-gcc, or Clang? The whole idea behind llvm seems very intriguing to me and I'm interested in seeing how it performs. I just don't want to dump a whole lot of time into trying the tools out if the tools are not ready for production. If you have experience with the tools, what do you think of t...
In order to create an arbitrary precision floating point / drop in replacement for Double, I'm trying to wrap MPFR using the FFI but despite all my efforts the simplest bit of code doesn't work. It compiles, it runs, but it crashes mockingly after pretending to work for a while. A simple C version of the code happily prints the number "1...
What library should be included to use TransparentBlt? This is VC98 (Visual Studio 6) linking to the Gdi32.lib. (Other GDI functions such as BitBlt link as expected), and the compilers compiles with out error or warning. Even though the Gdi32.lib is included, yet the linker returns this error: mtcombo.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved ...
I'm trying to find a way to get the execution time of a section of code in C. I've already tried both time() and clock() from time.h, but it seems that time() returns seconds and clock() seems to give me milliseconds (or centiseconds?) I would like something more precise though. Is there a way I can grab the time with at least microseco...
Are the string literals we use inside functions automatic variables? Or are they allocated in heap which we have to free manually? I've a situation like the code shown below wherein I'm assigning a string literal to a private field of the class (marked as ONE in the code) and retrieving it much later in my program and using it (marked a...
I know how to draw basic objects using JOGL or LWJGL to connect to OpenGL. What I would like is something that can generate some kind of geometry for trees, similar to what SpeedTree is famous for. Obviously I don't expect the same quality as SpeedTree. I want the trees to not look repetitive. Speed is not a concern, I do not expect to ...
I'm tidying up some older code that uses 'magic numbers' all over the place to set hardware registers, and I would like to use constants instead of these numbers to make the code somewhat more expressive (in fact they will map to the names/values used to document the registers). However, I'm concerned that with the volume of changes I m...