One of the links Mark posted earlier addresses the "The compiler should issue warnings" issue. The short answer is because of macro expansion and other code-rearranging optimizations (inlining functions, loop unrolling, pulling expressions out of a loop, etc.), undefined code appears and is removed more often than you'd expect. Issuing a warning *every time* this happens would generate many confusing warnings that users wouldn't like.
Also, the deeper you get into the optimized code, the harder it is to issue meaningful source-level warnings. E.g. when the compiler optimizes: static int decimate(x) { return x/10; } int foo() { int a=INT_MAX; int b;
for(i=0; i<100; ++i) { b=max(i, decimate(a*10));}
into int foo() { return INT_MAX; }
What warnings should appear for which lines?
On 26/11/13 11:37, Mark Haase wrote:Compiler developers, for better or worse, reserve the right to do
whatever they want with undefined behavior, and it's up to the person
writing the C code to not include undefined behavior in their own program.
That's a fallacy. The fact that a compiler does not violate the standard does not imply it is behaving sane. Thus, not violating the standard does not imply not having a bug.Considering a programmer would not ever *ever* want to fall into undefined behavior, the compiler should just issue warnings before making any kind of assumptions based after undefined behavior. Those warnings could be silenced with flags. This is a way of "yes, I'm sure of what I'm doing".Therefore, a Linux distribution has 2 choices: (1) wait for upstream
patches for bugs/vulnerabilities as they are found, or (2) recompile all
packages with optimizations disabled. I don't think proposal #2 would
get very far...
What about adding cppcheck warnings and gcc -Wall -pedantic be added to Lintian?Or what about changing debhelper to pass some -f flags by default?-- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-security-REQUEST@lists.debian.orgwith a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.orgArchive: [🔎] 529653DF.6010406@alvarezp.ods.org">http://lists.debian.org/[🔎] 529653DF.6010406@alvarezp.ods.org
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