PING [PATCH] handle "invisible" reference in -Wdangling-pointer (PR104436)

[Martin Sebor <msebor@gmail.com>]

Pinging the two patches here:
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2022-February/590230.html

On 2/10/22 16:04, Martin Sebor wrote:
> On 2/8/22 15:37, Jason Merrill wrote:
>> On 2/8/22 16:59, Martin Sebor wrote:
>>> Transforming a by-value arguments to by-reference as GCC does for some
>>> class types can trigger -Wdangling-pointer when the argument is used
>>> to store the address of a local variable.  Since the stored value is
>>> not accessible in the caller the warning is a false positive.
>>>
>>> The attached patch handles this case by excluding PARM_DECLs with
>>> the DECL_BY_REFERENCE bit set from consideration.
>>>
>>> While testing the patch I noticed some instances of the warning are
>>> uninitentionally duplicated as the pass runs more than once.  To avoid
>>> that, I also introduce warning suppression into the handler for this
>>> instance of the warning.  (There might still be others.)
>>
>> The second test should verify that we do warn about returning 't' from 
>> a function; we don't want to ignore the DECL_BY_REFERENCE RESULT_DECL.
> 
> The indirect aggregate case isn't handled and needs more work but
> since you brought it up I thought I should look into finishing it.
> The attached patch #2 adds support for it.  It also incorporates
> Richard's suggestion to test PARM_DECL.  Patch #2 applies on top
> of patch #1 which is unchanged from the first revision.
> 
> I have retested it on x86_64-linux and by building Glibc and
> Binutils + GDB.
> 
> If now is too late for the aggregate enhancement I'm okay with
> deferring it until stage 1.
> 
>>
>>> +      tree var = SSA_NAME_VAR (lhs_ref.ref);
>>> +      if (DECL_BY_REFERENCE (var))
>>> +        /* Avoid by-value arguments transformed into by-reference.  */
>>> +        continue;
>>
>> I wonder if we can we express this property of invisiref parms 
>> somewhere more general?  I imagine optimizations would find it useful 
>> as well. Could pointer_query somehow treat the reference as pointing 
>> to a function-local object?
> 
> I don't quite see where in the pointer_query class this would be
> useful (the class also isn't used for optimization).  I could add
> a helper to the access_ref class to query this property in warning
> code but as this is the only potential client I'm also not sure
> that's quite what you had in mind.  I'd need some guidance as to
> what you're thinking of here.
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
>>
>> I previously tried to express this by marking the reference as 
>> 'restrict', but that was wrong 
>> (https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=97474).
>>
>> Jason
>>