On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 7:21 AM, Ted Kremenek <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sep 23, 2011, at 9:33 PM, David Blaikie wrote:
>
>> Hi Ted,
>>
>> I tried -Wunreachable-code earlier today (Chandler had suggested it as a way 
>> to find/remove the dead code after llvm_unreachables I'd migrated yesterday) 
>> & it produced some very... interesting output. It did find the dead code 
>> after llvm_unreachable but it also found some other very strange cases. I 
>> was wondering what was up with that. Good to know it's WIP - any tips on the 
>> state of that? anywhere I'd be able to lend a hand?
>
> Hi David,
>
> The weirdest results I see from -Wunreachable-code tend to involve template 
> code.  In templates, I've seen cases where a branch condition depends on a 
> template parameter, and at template instantiation the branch condition may 
> become a constant.  This can cause some code to (correctly) be flagged as 
> unreachable for that particular instantiation of a template.  This of course 
> is not an invariant for that template for *all* instantiations, so it's not a 
> real issue.
>
> The solution I had in mind to fix this problem is to enhance the CFG.  
> Instead of just pruning CFG edges, for templates we could record when an edge 
> was pruned AND whether or not it was dependent on a template parameter.  Most 
> analyses would  continue to see the CFG as they do now, but specific analyses 
> (such as -Wunreachable-code) could do something a bit more clever and not 
> treat such code as unreachable.
>
>>
>> It wouldn't catch all the same cases ("case N: default: stuff" for example) 
>> but this solution isn't great either, it'll catch a variety of arcane cases 
>> that won't have trivial fixes.
>
> Ah, interesting.  -Wunreachable-code looks for finding unreachable basic 
> blocks, not looking at whether or not a label could never be used.  Those are 
> different concepts.
>
>> Chandler had mentioned the idea of this warning (well, something like it) 
>> yesterday but after I threw this together we were talking about it more & 
>> realized it'd be pretty tricky to get right with a nice multiline fixit that 
>> is very reliable (I get the impression that's what he's really interested in 
>> - really low (0?) false positive rate & accurate fixits - which would be 
>> awesome, but require a rather different fix)
>
> I agree.  A warning like this in the compiler needs close to a zero false 
> positive rate.

I'm just coming back to this (checking all my "loose ends" threads, or
at least some of them) and I can't quite remember what the problem was
here. Is there a case my warning would fire on that shouldn't be
fixed? I don't think so. The real issue would be the fixit - removing
the default label would always be valid, but that could introduce
(probably fairly trivial) unreachable code. Adding a fixit to remove
the whole block would be harder. Should we have the warning with no
fixit at all?

Also, I'm still interested in checking in the mechanical fixes & so
far as I know it's the intended/preferred way of writing switches in
Clang - it's usually given as code review feedback, but as with
everything that isn't verified, things slip through. So if someone
wants to confirm/sign off on that I'll check those in & we can nut out
the warning separately.

- David

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