4 ms·

I don't write C at all but aren't there code analysis tools that catch things like this? Some kind of standard code linting library, maybe?

andrewchambers 12y ago
Yes, the point is that these are obvious flaws, and dlink didn't even fix them. Someone from the dlink team just sucks. edit: And that someone may not even be the developer, at the end of the day, the company does not have the systems in place for quality control.
jheriko 12y ago
Yes there are these things, although usually more focused on C++ these days. Compiling C as C++ with a C++ compiler is not a bad idea though... many compilers which will deal with both and tend not to care about pure C very much at all. Modern, extremely popular compilers may not even support C89 features yet... not to mention that lots will allow dangerous things like returning nothing from a function with a non void return type without even a compile error. Many tools can catch the bugs mentioned here though - things like PVS studio, cppcheck, or the built in visual studio or xcode analysers (I would never recommend pc-lint, sorry), and some of these things mentioned are compiler warnings in some cases (sprintf will trigger the endlessly annoying CRT_NO_SECURE_WARNINGS message from the ms compiler for instance).
- rpcope1 12y ago
  Modern, extremely popular compilers may not even support C89 features yet... Citation needed please. Also, because C is not a true subset of C++, it has seemed that many big C projects will not compile on C++ compilers because of corner cases, so this may be something to watch for. Much of the incompatibility rises from additions in C99. References: (http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-c-program-wont-compiler-c/ http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-c-program-wont-compiler-c..., http://david.tribble.com/text/cdiffs.htm#C90-vs-CPP98 http://david.tribble.com/text/cdiffs.htm#C90-vs-CPP98)
  - jheriko 12y ago
    well spotted, that should have been C99, of which many features are not supported with the ms compiler. i believe that the variable array thing was pulled in C11 because so few compilers ever bothered to support it... i see problems with it regularly where we use c code that goes through clang just fine, but cl complains. not putting declarations at the top of a file or scope is the obvious example that comes to mind and constantly snags people... that being said there are even C++ problems, although smaller. for instance, its impossible to use the preprocessor variadic macros across cl, clang, gcc without getting warnings from at least one of them. i like to run with warnings as errors and the highest warning settings possible. i'm not going to bother digging up references for informal conversation... but thanks for catching the mistake.

andrewchambers 12y ago

Yes, the point is that these are obvious flaws, and dlink didn't even fix them. Someone from the dlink team just sucks. edit: And that someone may not even be the developer, at the end of the day, the company does not have the systems in place for quality control.

jheriko 12y ago

Yes there are these things, although usually more focused on C++ these days. Compiling C as C++ with a C++ compiler is not a bad idea though... many compilers which will deal with both and tend not to care about pure C very much at all. Modern, extremely popular compilers may not even support C89 features yet... not to mention that lots will allow dangerous things like returning nothing from a function with a non void return type without even a compile error. Many tools can catch the bugs mentioned here though - things like PVS studio, cppcheck, or the built in visual studio or xcode analysers (I would never recommend pc-lint, sorry), and some of these things mentioned are compiler warnings in some cases (sprintf will trigger the endlessly annoying CRT_NO_SECURE_WARNINGS message from the ms compiler for instance).

rpcope1 12y ago
Modern, extremely popular compilers may not even support C89 features yet... Citation needed please. Also, because C is not a true subset of C++, it has seemed that many big C projects will not compile on C++ compilers because of corner cases, so this may be something to watch for. Much of the incompatibility rises from additions in C99. References: (http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-c-program-wont-compiler-c/ http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/write-c-program-wont-compiler-c..., http://david.tribble.com/text/cdiffs.htm#C90-vs-CPP98 http://david.tribble.com/text/cdiffs.htm#C90-vs-CPP98)
- jheriko 12y ago
  well spotted, that should have been C99, of which many features are not supported with the ms compiler. i believe that the variable array thing was pulled in C11 because so few compilers ever bothered to support it... i see problems with it regularly where we use c code that goes through clang just fine, but cl complains. not putting declarations at the top of a file or scope is the obvious example that comes to mind and constantly snags people... that being said there are even C++ problems, although smaller. for instance, its impossible to use the preprocessor variadic macros across cl, clang, gcc without getting warnings from at least one of them. i like to run with warnings as errors and the highest warning settings possible. i'm not going to bother digging up references for informal conversation... but thanks for catching the mistake.