Re: Microsoft's obfuscated typedefs considered harmful

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 3:53 PM, Keith Marshall wrote:
> I've never much liked Microsoft's obfuscated typedefs; some on the
> grounds of ugliness, some because they are just plain pointless; all
> because they evade standards conforming clarity of purpose, and hinder
> portability of code.
>
> Here's one I'd previously considered to be in the pointless category:
>
>    typedef long LONG;
>
> However, while building pexports as a cross-tool, to be hosted on my
> 64-bit Debian box, I discover that the reality is worse; this turd is
> actually used in contexts which may actually result in segmentation
> faults, and consequent program crashes!  The explanation is that, in
> pexports.h I see a declaration, duplicated from our winnt.h, of the
> IMAGE_DOS_HEADER structure, in which the e_lfanew member is declared as
> being of type LONG; (it needs to be an explicit int32_t).  The problem
> is: on 64-bit Linux, GCC interprets long as equivalent to int64_t, and
> offsets computed on the basis of a 64-bit e_lfanew, in which the most
> significant 32-bits are garbage pulled in from the following field, (of
> a following structural data entity within the PE file image), are very
> likely to be out-of-bounds.
>
> I can easily fix this for pexports, but we may wish to consider the
> potential impact for winnt.h, and other API headers, in which the scope
> of the potential problem may be wider reaching; (it certainly affects
> more than just the IMAGE_DOS_HEADER structure).
>
> Thoughts?

I agree that they're a headache but a required one based on the Windows API.

IIRC, long on 64bit Windows is still 32bit. See
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/384502/what-is-the-bit-size-of-long-on-64-bit-windows
and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc302200.aspx

So LONG in both 32bit and 64bit Windows is still long.  Pointers are
64bit on the other hand.

-- 
Earnie
-- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd

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