> My understanding is the people responsible for the Unix POSIX standards did not like the design of these functions, so they refused to implement them.
And herein lies the actual issue: C has a sh*tton of API issues in its standard library, and people really want to fix as many of them as possible whenever possible, but doing so will destabilize the standard so most of them won't ever be accepted. In the case of Annex K many clearly felt that the size-restricted API alone is not enough, because it is still easy to desynchronize the buffer and the allocated size, and it's a good point if we ignore an obvious counterpoint of the lack of safe `getenv` alternatives in the standard library at all... I wonder about the alternative universe where we have two distinct standards for the C language and C standard library so that the library standard is much easier to fix and adapt.
And herein lies the actual issue: C has a sh*tton of API issues in its standard library, and people really want to fix as many of them as possible whenever possible, but doing so will destabilize the standard so most of them won't ever be accepted. In the case of Annex K many clearly felt that the size-restricted API alone is not enough, because it is still easy to desynchronize the buffer and the allocated size, and it's a good point if we ignore an obvious counterpoint of the lack of safe `getenv` alternatives in the standard library at all... I wonder about the alternative universe where we have two distinct standards for the C language and C standard library so that the library standard is much easier to fix and adapt.