Comment by ddulaney
5 years ago
It could be, and the article acknowledges that possibility. For example, a cursory check of the musl sscanf [0] suggests that it does not (though I may have missed something). However, whichever implementation Rockstar used apparently does.
[0]: https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/stdio/vfscanf.c
A lot of libc implementations seem to implement sscanf() this way: As well as the windows libc ones mentioned above, I checked the OpenBSD & glibc implemtations & they worked the same way.
Part of this is that game companies are notorious for re-implementing standard libraries for "performance". I suspect both shitty implementations of sscanf and the not-a-hashmap stem from this.
Slightly less cursory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26298300