On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 11:54 PM, Joshua Haberman <jhaber...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Richard Guenther <richard.guenther <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 10:55 PM, Joshua Haberman <jhaberman <at>
> gmail.com> wrote:
>> > This is why perfect warnings about this issue are not possible; if we
>> > see a downcast in isolation, we do not know if it is undoing a previous
>> > upcast or not. Only a tool like valgrind could check this perfectly, by
>> > observing reads and writes at runtime and checking the types of pointers
>> > that were used to perform the read/write.
>>
>> Correct (though valgrind operates at a too low level to know access types).
>
> Do the DWARF debugging symbols have enough information to determine the
> pointer type that was used for each load/store?
>
>> > char charray[sizeof(long)] = {...};
>> > long l = *(long*)charray; // ok
>>
>> not correct ;) (the lvalue has to be of character type, yours is of
>> type 'long' - the type of the actual object does not matter)
>
> I see -- good catch. To make it valid, I suppose "memcpy" could be used
> instead.
Yes.
>> Correct. C++ has the notion of dynamic types, so with C++
>>
>> int i;
>> *(foat *)&i = 0.0;
>> float f = *(float *)&i;
>>-
>> is ok (well - it's ok with a placement new, but a pointer cast is all
>> GCC sees here). The store changes the dynamic type of the
>> memory stored to and thus further reads are only valid using
>> the same type. GCC implements this also for C, but only starting
>> with GCC 4.5.
>
> C++'s notion of a "dynamic type" seems to be the same as what C99 calls
> the "effective type." See C99, Section 6.5, paragraph 6. Also see
> Defect Report #236 where the issue is raised, though the committee's
> reasoning does not make sense to me:
> http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/dr_236.htm
The difference is that in C++ the "dynamic type" can change while
in C an object with a declared type cannot change its effective type.
For anonymous memory the situation is similar to that in C++ though.
Then there are unions and this "active member" - but the effective
type of an object with union type is still that of the union.
GCC conforms to TC3 with respect to type punning through union
accesses.
Richard.
> (Thanks to Daniel Berlin for pointing me to the DR).
>
> Josh
>
>
