Conversation

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
From my perspective, regardless of how people want to handle unintended overflow, explicit intended overflow for new languages and new code in older languages can reach consensus. For signed in C it's barely even a discussion since you can't rely on it while being portable.
1
1
If you want portable signed overflow, you *already* have to define functions for it, which can use __builtin_mul_overflow when available (add/sub is trivial anyway) and otherwise implement it by hand. GCC -fwrapv is also notably not complete and not a good idea to rely on too.
2
It's noisy, but C doesn't support custom arithmetic types like Rust. Swift has wrapping operators. Wrapping is only commonly used for unsigned integers though. It's rarely ever wanted for signed integers, and is mostly a quirk of hardware rather than something actually used.
1
2
The checked_add, checked_sub, checked_mul methods are quite commonly used. I heavily use comparable functions in my C code implemented via the same underlying LLVM (and GCC) intrinsics when possible. It's needed a high % of the time to write correct code, way more than people do.
1
I'm sure you would still want it to trap in your usual debug builds though, even more so than usual, and you just can't have that kind of dynamic bug finding if you don't separate the intended overflows. In 2019, I kinda expect any decent C project to be using ASan and UBSan.
2
Show replies