On 01/12/15 16:07, Andrew Haley wrote: > Do we support left shift of a negative value? Technically it's > undefined and ubsan warns about it. However, a ton of software would > surely break if we didn't do the obvious right thing. I can't find > anything in the GCC manual. > > Thanks, > > Andrew. > I don't believe we do, or can as of today. Firstly, there are two possible 'obvious' behaviours: 1) The value is treated as signed and a negative shift turns into a positive shift in the other direction; 2) The value is treated as unsigned and the value is treated by a massive shift in the same direction that exceeds the normally supported range of the type. Which one is the default will probably depend on your hardware. Consider the case where the value is in a variable. To support negative shifts as reversed shifts on machines where they don't automatically convert negative values to reversed shifts you'd have to do an explicit range check before every shift using that value. Something I know we don't do today since I've never seen such checks come out on ARM, nor are there any hooks in the compiler to deal with it. R.
