RFR-8008118 (original) (raw)

Christos Zoulas christos at zoulas.com
Wed Apr 10 20:30:32 UTC 2013


On Apr 10, 11:54am, martinrb at google.com (Martin Buchholz) wrote: -- Subject: Re: RFR-8008118

| > 1. We did we switch from NEW() to xmalloc()? Why is the xmalloc cast | > needed? || NEW is for allocating homogeneous arrays, but here the memory block is | being used for both chars and pointers.

I did not know that. Why the cast though? xmalloc() returns void *, no? Extraneous casts are bad because they hide conversion errors. For example, if you don't have the xmalloc prototype in scope, without the cast you get a warning of casting integer to pointer of different size. With the cast you get the wrong data assigned to the pointer.

| > 2. I would not declare pathv "const char **", but "char **", and then | > cast the return if needed. This will make life easier in the future | > if we decide to turn on warnings about const-castaways. | > | > | I believe the current code doesn't cast away const and doesn't write to | const. The only cast is to the return from xmalloc, which is expected. | What might a compiler warn about?

It is casting away const before the memcpy:

Try to compile with -Wcast-qual.

christos



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