A couple of weeks ago I fixed a nasty bug in this function in OpenZFS:
  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    22·
    1 year ago

    A few years ago, all the languages I would use started to have automatic unused variable warnings built-in. And yeah, by now when I hear of people that don’t have that, it’s very much a feeling of “Man, you live like this?”.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
    233·
    1 year ago

    Scary indeed.

    This one could be helped by always using this pattern whenever you write a function that returns a value, in any language, along with no early returns:

    int func(...) {
    int result = -1;
    ...
    return result;
}

    I always start with writing my result default value, ideally indicating failure, and the return line. Then I implement the rest. We often don’t have the luxury of choosing the language we work with that has the features we like, but consistently enforced code style can help with a lot of problems. Anyone can make mistakes like the one in this bug regardless of experience so every little bit helps.

  • DapperPenguin@programming.dev
    131·
    1 year ago

    I appreciate rust as much as the next dev. But you can define your own types in C just as well? And with the proper warnings and errors -Wall -Werror in place, any warning is an error, and implicit conversions should probably be a warning right?

    ETA: Just tried with the following C code and could not get it to fail with gcc.

    typedef int t_0;
typedef long t_1;

t_0 test() {
  t_1 foo = 1;
  return foo;
}

    Tried with gcc -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -Werror and it compiled just fine.

    • brisk@aussie.zone
      5·
      1 year ago

      typedef in C just make an alias to the same type. structs have nominal typing though:

      // this typedef is optional to avoid having to refer to the struct tag when referencing the types
typedef struct {int} t_0;
typedef struct {long} t_1;

t_0 test() {
  t_1 foo = {1};
  return foo; // error
}