Back in 2015 when I reimplemented these functions to use an AVL tree, I
was annoyed by the weakness of the typing of these functions. Both tree
nodes and keys are represented by 'void *', meaning that things like the
documentation for these functions are an absolute train wreck.
To make things worse, users of these functions need to cast the return
value of tfind()/tsearch() from 'void *' to 'type_of_key **' in order to
access the key. Technically speaking such casts violate aliasing rules.
I've observed actual breakages as a result of this by enabling features
like LTO.
I've filed a bug report at the Austin Group. Looking at the way the bug
got resolved, they made a pretty good step in the right direction. A new
type 'posix_tnode' has been added to correspond to tree nodes. It is
still defined as 'void' for source-level compatibility, but in the very
far future it could be replaced by a proper structure type containing a
key pointer.
MFC after: 1 month
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D8205
4ef9bd22ed