Re: Microsoft's obfuscated typedefs considered harmful

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:49 AM, Keith Marshall wrote:
>
> However, a more serious issue arose at runtime; the use of 'LONG' to
> specify the type of the 'e_lfanew' field in the 'IMAGE_DOS_HEADER'
> struct; since 'LONG' is
>
>    typedef long LONG
>
> and 'long' is 64 bits on my 64-bit Debian box, the compiler interpreted
> this as a 64-bit 'e_lfanew' field, (which is wrong -- it *must* be an
> *explicit* 32-bit field), and the application blew up with a segment
> violation fault at runtime, as soon as it tried to parse the DLL image
> content, as referenced by the improperly sized e_lfanew offset value.
>

But why did your compiler DTWT?  I am assuming you're using a cross
compiler targeting MinGW?  If so, then long should be 32 bits.

> In summary: I'm not suggesting that we drop support for these Microsoft
> obfuscated typedefs; rather, we have an opportunity to engineer them
> better, (perhaps even better than Microsoft do themselves), and that we
> should maybe consider doing so.

I don't disagree with the idea, I'm hesitant because I fear that the
community expects them to be defined as they are by MS.

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

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