On Tue, Apr 02, 2024 at 10:41:40AM +0800, Li zeming wrote: > path is assigned first, so it does not need to initialize the > assignment. That's technically true, but the compiler is perfectly capable of optimizing it out. So it's harmless, and removing it does make the code a bit more fragile, since it needs to be set so that the cleanup code doesn't accidentally dereference an uninitialized pointer: out: up_read(&ei->i_data_sem); ext4_free_ext_path(path); return ret; So if later on, we add code which does a "goto out" on an error, before path gets initialized, that would be bad. So removing the "unnecessary" set has no upside, and it has a potential disadvantage. - Ted
