16 Who Says C is Simple?

When I (George) started to write CIL I thought it was going to take two weeks. Exactly a year has passed since then and I am still fixing bugs in it. This gross underestimate was due to the fact that I thought parsing and making sense of C is simple. You probably think the same. What I did not expect was how many dark corners this language has, especially if you want to parse real-world programs such as those written for GCC or if you are more ambitious and you want to parse the Linux or Windows NT sources (both of these were written without any respect for the standard and with the expectation that compilers will be changed to accommodate the program).

The following examples were actually encountered either in real programs or are taken from the ISO C99 standard or from the GCC’s testcases. My first reaction when I saw these was: Is this C?. The second one was : What the hell does it mean?.

If you are contemplating doing program analysis for C on abstract-syntax trees then your analysis ought to be able to handle these things. Or, you can use CIL and let CIL translate them into clean C code.

Why does the following code return 0 for most values of x ? (This should be easy.) int x; return x == (1 && x); See the CIL output for this code fragment Why does the following code return 0 and not -1? (Answer: because sizeof is unsigned, thus the result of the subtraction is unsigned, thus the shift is logical.) return ((1 - sizeof(int)) >> 32); See the CIL output for this code fragment Scoping rules can be tricky. This function returns 5. int x = 5; int f() { int x = 3; { extern int x; return x; } } See the CIL output for this code fragment Functions and function pointers are implicitly converted to each other. int (*pf)(void); int f(void) { pf = &f; // This looks ok pf = ***f; // Dereference a function? pf(); // Invoke a function pointer? (****pf)(); // Looks strange but Ok (***************f)(); // Also Ok } See the CIL output for this code fragment Initializer with designators are one of the hardest parts about ISO C. Neither MSVC or GCC implement them fully. GCC comes close though. What is the final value of i.nested.y and i.nested.z ? (Answer: 2 and respectively 6). struct { int x; struct { int y, z; } nested; } i = { .nested.y = 5, 6, .x = 1, 2 }; See the CIL output for this code fragment This is from c-torture. This function returns 1. typedef struct { char *key; char *value; } T1; typedef struct { long type; char *value; } T3; T1 a[] = { { "", ((char *)&((T3) {1, (char *) 1})) } }; int main() { T3 *pt3 = (T3*)a[0].value; return pt3->value; } See the CIL output for this code fragment Another one with constructed literals. This one is legal according to the GCC documentation but somehow GCC chokes on (it works in CIL though). This code returns 2. return ((int []){1,2,3,4})[1]; See the CIL output for this code fragment In the example below there is one copy of “bar” and two copies of “pbar” (static prototypes at block scope have file scope, while for all other types they have block scope). int foo() { static bar(); static (*pbar)() = bar; } static bar() { return 1; } static (*pbar)() = 0; See the CIL output for this code fragment Two years after heavy use of CIL, by us and others, I discovered a bug in the parser. The return value of the following function depends on what precedence you give to casts and unary minus: unsigned long foo() { return (unsigned long) - 1 / 8; } See the CIL output for this code fragment The correct interpretation is ((unsigned long) - 1) / 8 , which is a relatively large number, as opposed to (unsigned long) (- 1 / 8) , which is 0.

GCC has generalized lvalues. You can take the address of a lot of strange things: int x, y, z; return &(x ? y : z) - & (x++, x); See the CIL output for this code fragment GCC lets you omit the second component of a conditional expression. extern int f(); return f() ? : -1; // Returns the result of f unless it is 0 See the CIL output for this code fragment Computed jumps can be tricky. CIL compiles them away in a fairly clean way but you are on your own if you try to jump into another function this way. static void *jtab[2]; // A jump table static int doit(int x){ static int jtab_init = 0; if(!jtab_init) { // Initialize the jump table jtab[0] = &&lbl1; jtab[1] = &&lbl2; jtab_init = 1; } goto *jtab[x]; // Jump through the table lbl1: return 0; lbl2: return 1; } int main(void){ if (doit(0) != 0) exit(1); if (doit(1) != 1) exit(1); exit(0); } See the CIL output for this code fragment A cute little example that we made up. What is the returned value? (Answer: 1); return ({goto L; 0;}) && ({L: 5;}); See the CIL output for this code fragment extern inline is a strange feature of GNU C. Can you guess what the following code computes? extern inline foo(void) { return 1; } int firstuse(void) { return foo(); } // A second, incompatible definition of foo int foo(void) { return 2; } int main() { return foo() + firstuse(); } See the CIL output for this code fragment The answer depends on whether the optimizations are turned on. If they are then the answer is 3 (the first definition is inlined at all occurrences until the second definition). If the optimizations are off, then the first definition is ignore (treated like a prototype) and the answer is 4. CIL will misbehave on this example, if the optimizations are turned off (it always returns 3). GCC allows you to cast an object of a type T into a union as long as the union has a field of that type: union u { int i; struct s { int i1, i2; } s; }; union u x = (union u)6; int main() { struct s y = {1, 2}; union u z = (union u)y; } See the CIL output for this code fragment GCC allows you to use the __mode__ attribute to specify the size of the integer instead of the standard char , short and so on: int __attribute__ ((__mode__ ( __QI__ ))) i8; int __attribute__ ((__mode__ ( __HI__ ))) i16; int __attribute__ ((__mode__ ( __SI__ ))) i32; int __attribute__ ((__mode__ ( __DI__ ))) i64; See the CIL output for this code fragment The “alias” attribute on a function declaration tells the linker to treat this declaration as another name for the specified function. CIL will replace the declaration with a trampoline function pointing to the specified target. static int bar(int x, char y) { return x + y; } //foo is considered another name for bar. int foo(int x, char y) __attribute__((alias("bar"))); See the CIL output for this code fragment

16.3 Microsoft VC ugliness

This compiler has few extensions, so there is not much to say here.