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Comment by josefx | Hacker News Reader

C could provide functions to lock/unlock a mutex and require that any attempt to access the environment has to be done holding the mutex. This would still leave the correctness in the hands of the user, but at least it would provide a standard API to secure the environment in a multi threaded application that library and application developers could adopt.

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That is basically "what it means" if an interface is non-MT: you can call this no-problem if you know you're singlethreaded, and if you're not, find your own way to serialize (meaning: have your own locking prinitive you acquire/release where you make calls to these functions).

One could "dream of" a func that tells libc "acquire/drop this mutex of mine around get/set/putenv calls" but that'd simply move the problem - because the nifty "frameworks" would do that (independently of each other, we're sovereign and entitled frameworks around here) and race each other's state nonetheless.

> because the nifty "frameworks"

Malicious software exists, does that mean we should remove all threading primitives from the standard?

Obviously not, but _threading_ primitives are not the subject of this post at all. Declared-as Non-threadsafe interfaces are. And of course one (as is happening here) one can argue whether all "system runtimes" shall be threadsafe. Right now though, they are not, and agreed/sanctioned standards don't require them to be. Again (also as happening here) opinions may differ whether changes-to-make-threadsafe would be bugfixes, enhancements, or (require) new interfaces. I have expressed my views on this. Happy to agree to disagree, though.

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