[sebcat]

There was a code base where people wrapped glibc-functions. Most of the time it was straight calls to the corresponding functions in glibc, but they were called x... instead, so malloc became xmalloc, free became xfree, &c.

At one time there was a lot of zombie processes lingering for a long-ish time until the parent terminated and the zombies were reaped by init. I didn't bother to look at the implementation for xpopen, as I assumed it was just a call to popen. Turned out it wasnt; it was fork/exec with a socketpair turned into a FILE* with fdopen. The child was not waited for in xpclose.

I think there can be times when the facade pattern makes sense. I think there can be times when importing the world makes sense. I think there can be times when the opposite is true too. I think talking about these things in an abstract way can miss the point of the very insanity in some concrete solutions out there.

[mbrock]

Heh. Well, yeah, abstract opinions are always suspicious. In your case, making a facade around standard POSIX functions does seem weird, especially if the facade is itself buggy! For something that needs to be portable across many platforms, such a facade could be very useful though.