The Shape of Code

The ISO C Standard is currently being revised by WG14, to create C2X.

There is a rather nebulous clustering of people who want to stop compilers using undefined behaviors to generate what these people (and probably most other developers) consider to be very surprising code. For instance, always printing p is truep is false, when executing the code: bool p; if ( p ) printf("p is true"); if ( !p ) printf("p is false"); (possible because p is uninitialized, and accessing an uninitialized value is undefined behavior).

This sounds like a good thing; nobody wants compilers generating surprising code.

All the proposals I have seen, so far, involve doing away with constructs that can produce undefined behavior. Again, this sounds like a good thing; nobody likes undefined behaviors.

The problem is, there is a reason for labeling certain constructs as producing undefined behavior; the behavior is who-knows-what.

Now the C Standard could specify the who-knows-what behavior; for instance, it could specify that the result of dividing by zero is 42. Standard’s conforming compilers would then have to generate code to check whether the denominator was zero, and return 42 for this case (until Intel, ARM and other processor vendors ‘updated’ the behavior of their divide instructions). Way-back-when a design decision was made, the behavior of divide by zero is undefined, not 42 or any other value; this was a design decision, code efficiency and compactness was considered to be more important.

I have not seen anybody arguing that the behavior of divide by zero should be specified. But I have seen people arguing that once C’s integer representation is specified as being twos-compliment (currently it can also be ones-compliment or signed-magnitude), then arithmetic overflow becomes defined. Wrong.

Twos-compliment is a specification of a representation, not a specification of behavior. What is the behavior when the result of adding two integers cannot be represented? The result might be to wrap (the behavior expected by many developers), to saturate at the maximum value (frequently needed in image and signal processing), to raise a signal (overflow is not usually supposed to happen), or something else.

WG14 could define the behavior, for when the result of an arithmetic operation is not representable in the number of bits available. Standard’s conforming compilers targeting processors whose arithmetic instructions did not behave as required would have to generate code, for any operation that could overflow, to do what was necessary. The embedded market are heavy users of C; in this market memory is limited, and processor performance is never fast enough, the overhead of supporting a defined behavior could just be too high (a more attractive solution is to code review, to make sure the undefined behavior cannot occur).

Is there another way of addressing the issue of compiler writers’ use/misuse of undefined behavior? Yes, offer them money. Compiler writing is a business, at least at the level at which gcc and llvm operate. If people really are keen to influence the code generated by gcc and llvm, money is the solution. Wot, no money? Then stop complaining.