performing n-- is not a safe operation for arbitrary signed input n. only perform the decrement in the code path where the initial n is greater than 1, and adjust the condition in the n<=1 code path to compensate for it not having been decremented.
morally, for null pointers a and b, a-b, a<b, and a>b should all be defined as 0; however, C does not define any of them. the stdio implementation makes heavy use of such pointer comparison and subtraction for buffer logic, and also uses null pos/base/end pointers to indicate that the FILE is not in the corresponding (read or write) mode ready for accesses through the buffer. all of the comparisons are fixed trivially by using != in place of the relational operators, since the opposite relation (e.g. pos>end) is logically impossible. the subtractions have been reviewed to check that they are conditional the stream being in the appropriate reading- or writing-through-buffer mode, with checks added where needed. in fgets and getdelim, the checks added should improve performance for unbuffered streams by avoiding a do-nothing call to memchr, and should be negligible for buffered streams.
previously, fgets, fputs, fread, and fwrite completely omitted locking and access to the FILE object when their arguments yielded a zero length read or write operation independent of the FILE state. this optimization was invalid; it wrongly skipped marking the stream as byte-oriented (a C conformance bug) and exposed observably missing synchronization (a POSIX conformance bug) where one of these functions could wrongly complete despite another thread provably holding the lock.
the C standard requires that "the contents of the array remain unchanged" in this case. this patch also changes the behavior on read errors, but in that case "the array contents are indeterminate", so the application cannot inspect them anyway.
this header evolved to facilitate the extremely lazy practice of omitting explicit includes of the necessary headers in individual stdio source files; not only was this sloppy, but it also increased build time. now, stdio_impl.h is only including the headers it needs for its own use; any further headers needed by source files are included directly where needed.
to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99 compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form [restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
the biggest change in this commit is that stdio now uses readv to fill the caller's buffer and the FILE buffer with a single syscall, and likewise writev to flush the FILE buffer and write out the caller's buffer in a single syscall. making this change required fundamental architectural changes to stdio, so i also made a number of other improvements in the process: - the implementation no longer assumes that further io will fail following errors, and no longer blocks io when the error flag is set (though the latter could easily be changed back if desired) - unbuffered mode is no longer implemented as a one-byte buffer. as a consequence, scanf unreading has to use ungetc, to the unget buffer has been enlarged to hold at least 2 wide characters. - the FILE structure has been rearranged to maintain the locations of the fields that might be used in glibc getc/putc type macros, while shrinking the structure to save some space. - error cases for fflush, fseek, etc. should be more correct. - library-internal macros are used for getc_unlocked and putc_unlocked now, eliminating some ugly code duplication. __uflow and __overflow are no longer used anywhere but these macros. switch to read or write mode is also separated so the code can be better shared, e.g. with ungetc. - lots of other small things.