I've found a couple of places where sparse behaves rather oddly.
Firstly, if you declare something static, and then try to define it
later, sparse appears to get confused:
---snip---
static int i;
int i = 0;
---snip---
$ ./test-parsing test.c
test.c:2:5: warning: symbol 'i' was not declared. Should it be static?
.align 4
int static [signed] [toplevel] i,
.align 4
int [signed] [addressable] [toplevel] i =
movi.32 v1,$0
Enumeration of the list of defined symbols shows two different symbols
with the name 'i'. This isn't entirely obvious when using the test tools
as, of course, two strings with the same value look the same! This is
causing me issues with forward declarations of static functions:
static void foo();
{ ... foo(); ... } // calls static foo
foo() {} // defines extern foo
{ ... foo(); ... } // calls extern foo
This then leads to link errors as static foo hasn't been found.
The second issue is with the following piece of C99 code:
---snip---
extern void nop(void)
void bar(void)
{ for (int i=0; i<10; i++) nop(); }
---snip---
$ ./test-linearise test.c
test.c:3:6: warning: symbol 'bar' was not declared. Should it be static?
bar:
.L0xb7d7600c:
<entry-point>
br .L0xb7d76038
.L0xb7d76038:
call nop
br .L0xb7d76038
The for loop seems to silently turn into an infinite loop. Which did
cause one of my benchmarks to, um, produce rather poor results...
(You may be interested to know that my compiler is now producing
working, running code for non-trivial apps. Big chunks of it do need
throwing away and rewriting, but it's actually *working*!)
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