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NK_DTOA needs more documentation

Open Xeverous opened this issue 1 year ago • 2 comments

The current documentation states:

You can define this to dtoa or your own double to string conversion implementation replacement. If not defined nuklear will use its own imprecise and possibly unsafe version (does not handle nan or infinity!).

The problem is, there is no such function. dtoa is neither in C standard library, C++ standard library or in POSIX. I just don't know what is the "contract" of this function.

Based on Nuklear's code:

https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear/blob/ca8aaf3f65e9fc8ac5d90fefc1204585add4b89b/nuklear.h#L7116-L7117

The function takes a buffer and a value of type double and returns the end of the string in the buffer.

How large the buffer should be? I checked the implementation and found out it is NK_MAX_NUMBER_BUFFER. This constant is documented but it is easy to lose it - NK_DTOA does not mention it and does not even specify how the function should look like (and there is no standard function to look into).

IMO it should be documented that:

  • NK_DTOA relies on NK_MAX_NUMBER_BUFFER
  • what the expected function prototype is
  • what the expected behavior is (e.g. returns start or end of buffer)

Xeverous avatar Sep 23 '24 20:09 Xeverous

fwiw the return value seems to be unused in nuklear.h. since there are cases where nk_dtoa gets caught in an infinite loop (didn't have time to reproduce and fix, sorry), i replaced it like so:

#define NK_DTOA(S, D) sprintf(S, "%g", D)
#include "nuklear.h"

hanatos avatar Dec 05 '24 08:12 hanatos

Maintainer note: might be nice to revisit this when dealing with https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear/issues/415 (something in my guts tells me those two are related)

[...] i replaced it like so:

#define NK_DTOA(S, D) sprintf(S, "%g", D)

nice hack btw :D

sleeptightAnsiC avatar Nov 17 '25 18:11 sleeptightAnsiC