difference between gmtime_r and gmtime_s

Question

Which is the difference between these two functions? I'm using MinGW 4.8.0.

I know that gmtime_r is thread safe ( but not secure if called multiple time from the same thread) but I don't understand gmtime_s

Answer 1

The difference is that gmtime_r(3) is a standard SUSv2 function. The closest you can find to gmtime_r() on a windows environment is gmtime_s(), which has its arguments reversed:

• gmtime_r(const time_t*, struct tm*)
• gmtime_s(struct tm*, const time_t*)

Basically, they both convert a time value to a tm structure. gmtime_r then return a pointer to this structure (or NULL if failed), whereas gmtime_s returns 0 if successful, and a errno_t in case of failure.

The tm structure has the following body, as can be seen from both docs listed above:

struct tm {
    int tm_sec;         /* seconds */
    int tm_min;         /* minutes */
    int tm_hour;        /* hours */
    int tm_mday;        /* day of the month */
    int tm_mon;         /* month */
    int tm_year;        /* year */
    int tm_wday;        /* day of the week */
    int tm_yday;        /* day in the year */
    int tm_isdst;       /* daylight saving time */
};