internally, the idiom of passing nmemb=1 to fwrite and interpreting the return value of fwrite (which is necessarily 0 or 1) as failure/success is fairly widely used. this is not correct, however, when the size argument is unknown and may be zero, since C requires fwrite to return 0 in that special case. previously fwrite always returned nmemb on success, but this was changed for conformance with ISO C by commit 500c6886c654fd45e4926990fee2c61d816be197.
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.
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.