On Mon, May 07, 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:On Mon, 7 May 2007, Esben Nielsen wrote:
What is (long)(a-b) ? I have tried to look it up in the C99 standeard but I
can't find it. Maybe it is in the referred LIA-1 standeard, which I can't find
with google.
C99 defines unsigned overflow semantics, but it doesn't say anything
about signed overflow, thus it's undefined -- and you have a hard
time finding it out.
However, I have no clue *why* it's undefined and not
implementation defined. Does someone know?
I don't worry about non-2's-complement machines (they don't exist, and
likely won't exist in the future either).
I think DSPs can do saturated arithmetics (clamp to min/max
values instead of wrap around). Not that it matters for Linux...
So I worry about compilers rewriting my code.
gcc has -fwrapv and -ftrapv to change signed integer overflow
behaviour.
One baffling example where gcc rewrites code is when
conditionals depend on signed integer overflow:
$ cat xx.c
#include <assert.h>
int foo(int a)
{
assert(a + 100 > a);
return a;
}
int bar(int a)
{
if (a + 100 > a)
a += 100;
return a;
}
$ gcc -Wall -Wextra -fomit-frame-pointer -c xx.c
$ objdump -dr xx.o
xx.o: file format elf32-i386
Disassembly of section .text:
00000000 <foo>:
0: 8b 44 24 04 mov 0x4(%esp),%eax
4: c3 ret
00000005 <bar>:
5: 83 44 24 04 64 addl $0x64,0x4(%esp)
a: 8b 44 24 04 mov 0x4(%esp),%eax
e: c3 ret
The assert and the condition were just dropped
by gcc -- without any warning.
gcc-4.2 will add -fstrict-overflow and -Wstrict-overflow.
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.2/changes.html
Johannes