Inefficiency probably doesn't need any comment (these functions traverse string twice instead of once). His argument that string length should be always known is correct in theory although not in practice.
You're looking at it wrong. strlcpy is defined to be slow in certain cases. The API requires it. Other interfaces may be slow today but can be improved in the future because they don't have a return value that is inconvenient. (Notably, memccpy today is typically a memchr followed by memcpy, since this is faster than a naive implementation. Obviously if it gets used more then it will get replaced with a single-pass, machine optimized implementation.)
Not really, more that the implementation of sscanf() is stupid and calls strlen() even though implementing sscanf() that doesn't require that is perfectly possible.
Instead of putting up with people constantly complaining how C is bad because of zero-terminated strings, we should better educate folks that there is absolutely zero reason why one has to rely on a NUL byte in-band signal. And APIs like sscanf() shouldn't be used beyond their historic purposes and there are easier ways to program.
C doesn't really "have" zero-terminated strings other than supporting them with string literals as well as having an atrocious "strings" library for historical reasons. C has storage and gives you the means to copy data around, that's it.
(Although I fully agree that the GTA issue can be seen as a bug in the implementation of sscanf()).
It's not any slower in the typical case where destination buffer is large enough to fit the source thing. And if that's not the case then we are most likely in a error case (either caller notices the truncation and decides to abort, or ignores the truncation and things may soon go boom), and not many people care about optimizing error paths.
Furthermore, when coders dont't have strlcpy() the alternatives are often even worse than strlcpy():
1) They use strcpy() and have buffer overflows.
2) They use strncpy() which is slower than strlcpy() in the common (non truncating) case, and in the truncating case leave the string unterminated (thus segfault potential)
3) They use snprintf(dst, len, "%s", src); which is strictly slower than strlcpy()
Since the error path is the largest one (the string doesn’t fit…) it makes sense to bound its execution. I would not recommend the others FWIW for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
Why would you optimize for the error case and not the common case? You've already done an unbounded amount of work copying the string in from the network or wherever. If anybody cared that much, they wouldn't let the string get that long in the first place.
It can be appropriate to bound the runtime of certain components of a system while allowing looser constraints elsewhere. For example I would perhaps not want to do an O(n) string operation on a collection of strings even though the user would be pretty upset if they can’t paste infinite input into my app.
