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(Repost from https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/19571, in response to a suggestion that the mailing list might be a better forum for discussion.)
Hi all,
Earlier today I discovered that XSUB.h overwrites functions like htons. With Leon’s help I learned that it has to do with the implicit-sys logic, which itself depends on NO_XSLOCKS being undefined. While perlguts discusses NO_XSLOCKS, it makes no mention of its role vis-à-vis implicit-sys.
The overwrite is problematic because Perl’s versions of these functions require the thread-context local variable (aTHX), which means C functions that lack that local variable will break when calling these. For example:
```
static int _my_htons(int myint) {
return htons(myint);
}
/* Then, later … */
int
do_htons(SV* somenum)
CODE:
UV mynum = SvUV(somenum);
RETVAL _my_htons((int) mynum);
OUTPUT:
RETVAL
}
```
The overwrite’s rationale of things like open(), per Leon, is that it allows different Perl interpreters to implement those differently. The problems are:
• It’s undocumented, as far as I can tell.
• It seems unclear what purpose a per-interpreter override of something like htons(), which is a pure function, would serve.
It seems to me:
- The documentation--perlguts?--should discuss this part of implicit-sys.
- Maybe it’s reasonable to shrink the set of functions that implicit-sys overrides?
Thank you!
-FG
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