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From: Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>
To: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com>, GCC <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>,
	Alejandro Colomar <alx@nginx.com>,
	Andrew Clayton <a.clayton@nginx.com>,
	Andrew Clayton <andrew@digital-domain.net>,
	<linux-hardening@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [wish] Flexible array members in unions
Date: Thu, 11 May 2023 20:53:52 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <74ee73d2-04e-ea8-9430-93929446e925@codesourcery.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <202305111158.C78642624@keescook>

On Thu, 11 May 2023, Kees Cook via Gcc wrote:

> On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 06:29:10PM +0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > On 5/11/23 18:07, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > [...]
> > > Would you allow flexible array members in unions?  Is there any
> > > strong reason to disallow them?
> 
> Yes please!! And alone in a struct, too.
> 
> AFAICT, there is no mechanical/architectural reason to disallow them
> (especially since they _can_ be constructed with some fancy tricks,
> and they behave as expected.) My understanding is that it's disallowed
> due to an overly strict reading of the very terse language that created
> flexible arrays in C99.

Standard C has no such thing as a zero-size object or type, which would 
lead to problems with a struct or union that only contains a flexible 
array member there.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com

  reply	other threads:[~2023-05-11 20:53 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2023-05-11 16:07 Alejandro Colomar
2023-05-11 16:29 ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-05-11 19:07   ` Kees Cook
2023-05-11 20:53     ` Joseph Myers [this message]
2023-05-11 21:13       ` Kees Cook
2023-05-11 21:43         ` Joseph Myers
2023-05-11 22:16           ` Kees Cook
2023-05-11 22:52             ` Joseph Myers
2023-05-12  0:25               ` Alejandro Colomar
2023-05-12  7:49             ` Jonathan Wakely
2023-05-12  6:16         ` Richard Biener
2023-05-12 12:32           ` David Brown
2023-05-15 19:58           ` Qing Zhao
2023-05-18 16:25           ` Martin Uecker
2023-05-18 20:59             ` Qing Zhao
2023-05-19 12:08               ` Martin Uecker

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