xref: /freebsd/lib/libc/locale/DESIGN.xlocale (revision 05248206f720394d95c2a7475429311df670a2e9)

Design of xlocale
=================

The xlocale APIs come from Darwin, although a subset is now part of POSIX 2008.
They fall into two broad categories:

- Manipulation of per-thread locales (POSIX)
- Locale-aware functions taking an explicit locale argument (Darwin)

This document describes the implementation of these APIs for FreeBSD.

Goals
-----

The overall goal of this implementation is to be compatible with the Darwin
version.  Additionally, it should include minimal changes to the existing
locale code.  A lot of the existing locale code originates with 4BSD or earlier
and has had over a decade of testing.  Replacing this code, unless absolutely
necessary, gives us the potential for more bugs without much benefit.

With this in mind, various libc-private functions have been modified to take a
locale_t parameter.  This causes a compiler error if they are accidentally
called without a locale.  This approach was taken, rather than adding _l
variants of these functions, to make it harder for accidental uses of the
global-locale versions to slip in.

Locale Objects
--------------

A locale is encapsulated in a `locale_t`, which is an opaque type: a pointer to
a `struct _xlocale`.  The name `_xlocale` is unfortunate, as it does not fit
well with existing conventions, but is used because this is the name the Darwin
implementation gives to this structure and so may be used by existing (bad) code.

This structure should include all of the information corresponding to a locale.
A locale_t is almost immutable after creation.  There are no functions that modify it,
and it can therefore be used without locking.  It is the responsibility of the
caller to ensure that a locale is not deallocated during a call that uses it.

Each locale contains a number of components, one for each of the categories
supported by `setlocale()`.  These are likewise immutable after creation.  This
differs from the Darwin implementation, which includes a deprecated
`setinvalidrune()` function that can modify the rune locale.

The exception to these mutability rules is a set of `mbstate_t` flags stored
with each locale.  These are used by various functions that previously had a
static local `mbstate_t` variable.

The components are reference counted, and so can be aliased between locale
objects.  This makes copying locales very cheap.

The Global Locale
-----------------

All locales and locale components are reference counted.  The global locale,
however, is special.  It, and all of its components, are static and so no
malloc() memory is required when using a single locale.

This means that threads using the global locale are subject to the same
constraints as with the pre-xlocale libc.  Calls to any locale-aware functions
in threads using the global locale, while modifying the global locale, have
undefined behaviour.

Because of this, we have to ensure that we always copy the components of the
global locale, rather than alias them.

It would be cleaner to simply remove the special treatment of the global locale
and have a locale_t lazily allocated for the global context.  This would cost a
little more `malloc()` memory, so is not done in the initial version.

Caching
-------

The existing locale implementation included several ad-hoc caching layers.
None of these were thread safe.  Caching is only really of use for supporting
the pattern where the locale is briefly changed to something and then changed
back.

The current xlocale implementation removes the caching entirely.  This pattern
is not one that should be encouraged.  If you need to make some calls with a
modified locale, then you should use the _l suffix versions of the calls,
rather than switch the global locale.  If you do need to temporarily switch the
locale and then switch it back, `uselocale()` provides a way of doing this very
easily: It returns the old locale, which can then be passed to a subsequent
call to `uselocale()` to restore it, without the need to load any locale data
from the disk.

If, in the future, it is determined that caching is beneficial, it can be added
quite easily in xlocale.c.  Given, however, that any locale-aware call is going
to be a preparation for presenting data to the user, and so is invariably going
to be part of an I/O operation, this seems like a case of premature
optimisation.

localeconv
----------

The `localeconv()` function is an exception to the immutable-after-creation
rule.  In the classic implementation, this function returns a pointer to some
global storage, which is initialised with the data from the current locale.
This is not possible in a multithreaded environment, with multiple locales.

Instead, each locale contains a `struct lconv` that is lazily initialised on
calls to `localeconv()`.  This is not protected by any locking, however this is
still safe on any machine where word-sized stores are atomic: two concurrent
calls will write the same data into the structure.

Explicit Locale Calls
---------------------

A large number of functions have been modified to take an explicit `locale_t`
parameter.  The old APIs are then reimplemented with a call to `__get_locale()`
to supply the `locale_t` parameter.  This is in line with the Darwin public
APIs, but also simplifies the modifications to these functions.  The
`__get_locale()` function is now the only way to access the current locale
within libc.  All of the old globals have gone, so there is now a linker error
if any functions attempt to use them.

The ctype.h functions are a little different.  These are not implemented in
terms of their locale-aware versions, for performance reasons.  Each of these
is implemented as a short inline function.

Differences to Darwin APIs
--------------------------

`strtoq_l()` and `strtouq_l() `are not provided.  These are extensions to
deprecated functions - we should not be encouraging people to use deprecated
interfaces.

Locale Placeholders
-------------------

The pointer values 0 and -1 have special meanings as `locale_t` values.  Any
public function that accepts a `locale_t` parameter must use the `FIX_LOCALE()`
macro on it before using it.  For efficiency, this can be emitted in functions
which *only* use their locale parameter as an argument to another public
function, as the callee will do the `FIX_LOCALE()` itself.

Potential Improvements
----------------------

Currently, the current rune set is accessed via a function call.  This makes it
fairly expensive to use any of the ctype.h functions.  We could improve this
quite a lot by storing the rune locale data in a __thread-qualified variable.

Several of the existing FreeBSD locale-aware functions appear to be wrong.  For
example, most of the `strto*()` family should probably use `digittoint_l()`,
but instead they assume ASCII.  These will break if using a character encoding
that does not put numbers and the letters A-F in the same location as ASCII.
Some functions, like `strcoll()` only work on single-byte encodings.  No
attempt has been made to fix existing limitations in the libc functions other
than to add support for xlocale.

Intuitively, setting a thread-local locale should ensure that all locale-aware
functions can be used safely from that thread.  In fact, this is not the case
in either this implementation or the Darwin one.  You must call `duplocale()`
or `newlocale()` before calling `uselocale()`.  This is a bit ugly, and it
would be better if libc ensure that every thread had its own locale object.