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[PATCH] silence gcc array-bounds warning

From
Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date
Oct 4, 2013, 07:52 UTC
Message-ID
<20131004075234.GA26068@sigill.intra.peff.net>

In shorten_unambiguous_ref, we build and cache a reverse-map of the rev-parse rules like this:

  static char **scanf_fmts;
  static int nr_rules;
  if (!nr_rules) {
	  for (; ref_rev_parse_rules[nr_rules]; nr_rules++)
		  ... generate scanf_fmts ...
  }

where ref_rev_parse_rules is terminated with a NULL pointer. Compiling with "gcc -O2 -Wall" does not cause any problems, but compiling with "-O3 -Wall" generates:

  $ make CFLAGS='-O3 -Wall' refs.o
  refs.c: In function ‘shorten_unambiguous_ref’:
  refs.c:3379:29: warning: array subscript is above array bounds [-Warray-bounds]
     for (; ref_rev_parse_rules[nr_rules]; nr_rules++)

Curiously, we can silence this by explicitly nr_rules to 0 in the beginning of the loop, even though the compiler should be able to tell that we follow this code path only when nr_rules is already 0.

Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
---
I've convinced myself that this is a gcc bug and not some weird
undefined behavior or extra analysis that gcc can do due to inlined
functions. The fact that what should be a noop makes the warning go away
makes me very suspicious.
You can also silence it by declaring ref_rev_parse_rules as:
  const char * const ref_rev_parse_rules[];

to make both the strings themselves and the pointers in the list constant. And that may be worth doing instead, because it really is a constant list for us. The downside is that it's a little uglier to read, and it carries over to pointers we use to access it, like:

  const char * const *p;
  for (p = ref_rev_parse_rules; *p; p++)
     ...
 refs.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/refs.c b/refs.c
index ad5d66c..c1cc98a 100644
--- a/refs.c
+++ b/refs.c
@@ -3376,7 +3376,7 @@ char *shorten_unambiguous_ref(const char *refname, int strict)
 		size_t total_len = 0;
 
 		/* the rule list is NULL terminated, count them first */
-		for (; ref_rev_parse_rules[nr_rules]; nr_rules++)
+		for (nr_rules = 0; ref_rev_parse_rules[nr_rules]; nr_rules++)
 			/* no +1 because strlen("%s") < strlen("%.*s") */
 			total_len += strlen(ref_rev_parse_rules[nr_rules]);
 
-- 
1.8.4.1.4.gf327177
Message 1 of 1 in “silence gcc array-bounds warning”
  1. silence gcc array-bounds warningJeff King, Oct 4, 2013

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