to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99
compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined
appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form
[restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the
original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
clean and simple, but fails when the caller does not have permissions
to open the file for reading or when /proc is not available. i may
replace this with a full implementation later, possibly leaving this
version as an optimization to use when it works.
