this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Programming
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Aaand.. you didn't even bother to google it :/
This is not about storage durations, and it's local to a function
I don't need to Google anything. I have 30 years experience writing C & C++.
Yes it is.
https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/storage_duration
Only the visibility is local. The data is still global state. You can call that function from anywhere and it will use the same state. That's what global state means.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/314983
Some of the biggest issues with global state are that is makes testing difficult and it makes concurrent code more error-prone. Both of those are still true for locally scoped static variables.
Again, it's an easy refactor to make it not global. There are cases where that extra abstraction work simply does not add value.
With your background, you should know that
I have enough experience to know that making global state non-global is usually anything but easy.
Damn, suppose I won't just pass it as a pointer from the call site. That'd be so difficult to add an int to a struct
30 years my ass
Yes, and then pass the context from the call sites of that function, and all the way up to
main(). Oh look you're refactored the entire app.That's best cases too, you'd better hope your program isn't actually a shared library running in a SystemVerilog simulator with state instantiated from separate modules via DPI, or whatever.
lol when you have 30 years experience you will have actually tried to do this a few times and realised it isn't usually as trivial as you hope it would be.
That's not a great approach, but you do you