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Re: Type-safe typecasts


From: Bruno Haible
Subject: Re: Type-safe typecasts
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2021 22:13:20 +0200
User-agent: KMail/5.1.3 (Linux/4.4.0-206-generic; KDE/5.18.0; x86_64; ; )

Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen wrote:

> gl_list_iterator_t i = gl_list_iterator (list);
> struct foo *elt;
> while (gl_list_iterator_next (&i, (const void **) &elt, NULL))
>   ++elt->bar;

This cast is dangerous: It silences the warning "passing argument 2 of
'gl_list_iterator_next' from incompatible pointer type", and is (AFAICS)
a violation of the C strict-aliasing rule [1].

> So to make my original code portable C, I would have to code
> 
> ...
> const void *e;
> while (gl_list_iterator_next (&i, &e, NULL))
>   {
>     struct foo *foo = (void *) e;
>     ++foo->bar;
>   }

Right, this is the way it should be written.

> The const typecast is, unfortunately, still needed to silence compiler
> warnings as the Gnulib list API suffers a bit from const-poisoning when the
> actual elements are pointers actually non-const objects.

Yes. The element type could be 'const void *' everywhere or 'void *'
everywhere. Since the generic list code does not write to these pointers,
I chose 'const void *'.

Bruno

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/98650/what-is-the-strict-aliasing-rule




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