Re: nstrftime.c fails to build due to memset overflow

[Paul Eggert]

On 3/15/23 02:41, Marcus Müller wrote:

> If my compiler doesn't optimize it away, well, then I have caused very 
> little overhead.

It's not really a question of overhead. Unecessary initializations make 
code harder to understand. Polluting code with unnecessary 
initializations together with comments like /* Initialize this variable 
to pacify gcc 13.1 x86-64 when compiled with -Wall -O2; see 
<https://bugs.gnu.org/99999>. */ is better, but it also gets in the way 
of code ability (and is so rarely done right that I hesitate even 
mentioning it). Making code hard to understand (and/or hard to write 
correctly) drives up maintenance costs and that makes bugs more likely.

This sort of code pollution is the tail wagging the dog. The goal should 
not be to pacify compilers' false alarms. The goal should be to have 
code that works correctly, is easy to understand, is efficient, etc.

We should of course encourage compiler-writers to write smarter 
compilers with fewer false alarms, and we can do that by filing bug 
reports (which I do) and getting these false alarms fixed (which does 
happen). This approach is better in the long run than polluting the 
source code.

If these sorts of false alarms were a real problem, we could disable 
them with the appropriate -Wno-... option, rather than polluting the 
code to work around them. However, the false alarms we're talking about, 
which occur when compiling with -O0 -Wmaybe-initialized warnings, are 
not worth worrying about. We can just ask people not to use that 
combination of options (since it's counterproductive) and we can leave 
the code alone. And that is what we should do here.