From: "Jeff King" <peff@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 7:21 AM
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 07:57:20AM +0200, Johannes Sixt wrote:
Am 7/15/2013 19:31, schrieb Ramsay Jones:
> Sparse issues three "Using plain integer as NULL pointer" warnings.
> Each warning relates to the use of an '{0}' initialiser expression
> in the declaration of an 'struct object_info'.
I question the value of this warning. Initialization with '= {0}' is
a
well-established idiom, and sparse should know about it. Also, plain
0
*is* a null pointer constant.
I agree with you. It's not a bug, and I think sparse is being overly
picky here; it is missing the forest for the trees in interpreting the
idiom.
Still, it may be worth tweaking in the name of eliminating compiler
noise, since it does not cost us very much to do so (and I believe we
have done so in the past, too).
We could also ask people with sparse to turn off the "use NULL instead
of 0" warning, but I think it _is_ a useful warning elsewhere (even
though it is never a bug, it violates our style guidelines and may be
an
indication of a bug). It would be nice if sparse learned to ignore the
warning in this particular idiom, but I am not going to hold my breath
for that.
-Peff
--
On the subject of warnings and null pointers, yesterday's Code Project
news linked to a blog on the problems of unexpected optimization bugs,
such as dereferencing a null pointer. "Finding Undefined Behavior Bugs
by Finding Dead Code" http://blog.regehr.org/archives/970 which links to
the draft of an interesting paper
[http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~xi/papers/stack-sosp13.pdf]
Does anyone run the "new static checker called 'Stack' that precisely
identifies unstable code"? [though the paper's conclusion says 'All
Stack source code will be publicly available.' which suggests it's not
yet available]
Or use the ‘-fno-delete-null-pointer-checks’ referred to in the blog
comments (see also index : kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git "Add
'-fno-delete-null-pointer-checks' to gcc CFLAGS"
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=a3ca86aea507904148870946d599e07a340b39bf
You're probably already aware of these aspects but I thought it worth
mentioning for the wider readership.
regards
Philip
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