Re: More C type errors by default for GCC 14

[Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com>]

> Am 09.05.2023 um 14:16 schrieb Florian Weimer via Gcc <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>:
> 
> TL;DR: This message is about turning implicit-int,
> implicit-function-declaration, and possibly int-conversion into errors
> for GCC 14.

I suppose the goal is to not need to rely on altering CFLAGS but change the default behavior with still being able to undo this using -Wno-error= or -Wno-?

I think instead of hard-coding a set of changes would it be possible to alter the default setting of diagnostic options during GCC configuration?  And maybe even note that when diagnosing?

Thanks,
Richard 

> A few of you might remember that I've been looking into turning some
> type errors from warnings into errors by default.  Mainly I've been
> looking at implicit function declarations because in too many cases, the
> synthesized declaration does not match the prototype used at function
> definition and can cause subtle ABI issues.
> 
> To recap, the main challenge is that GCC has to serve disparate groups
> of users: some use GCC for writing programs themselves, but others just
> need GCC to build sources that they have obtained from somewhere.  The
> first group benefits from more type errors because they catch errors
> earlier during development (experience shows that compiler warnings are
> easy to miss in a long build log).  The second group might find these
> errors challenging because the sources they have no longer build.
> 
> To see how large the impact is on that second group, we've mostly
> removed implicit function declarations and implicit ints from Fedora:
> 
>  <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PortingToModernC>
>  <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Toolchain/PortingToModernC>
> 
> Roughly 870 packages out of ~14,500 that have GCC present during the
> build needed fixing (or flagging that they can't be built with the
> additional errors), so 6%.  Most of the changes are mechanical in
> nature, like adding additional headers to configure checks.  For about
> ~150 packages, automated patching could be used to rewrite problematic
> built-in checks generated by long-obsolete autoconf versions.
> 
> Some of these changes prevent the compiler behavior for altering the
> build results silently because the new errors changed the outcome of
> autoconf checks.  (We had one of those in libstdc++, changing the ABI on
> GNU/Linux because futex support oculd no longer be detected.)
> Unfortunately, I did not record numbers about them, but think those were
> quite rare; most autoconf problems were also accompanied with other
> problems, or the incorrect results from autoconf led to build failures
> later.  So it seems to me that the risk that the second group mentioned
> above would silently get unexpected build results is fairly low.
> 
> Where possible, we tried to upstream patches, to simplify sharing across
> distributions and to help those who compile upstream sources directly.
> We also benefited from other distributions upstreaming changes along
> similar lines (notably Gentoo for their Clang 16 project, but also from
> Homebrew to a lesser extent).
> 
> An area we started exploring only recently for Fedora is implicit
> conversions between integers and pointers (covered by -Wint-conversion).
> These add another ~170 packages, but some of those are false positives
> (due to our instrumented compiler approach) that do not change the build
> outcome at all.  I'm still negotiating whether we have the capacity to
> develop fixes for these packages proactively.
> 
> I brought up the matter with distributions, and the feedback was neutral
> (not overly negative, as in “this would be the end of the world for
> us”).
> 
>  <https://discourse.nixos.org/t/rfc-more-c-errors-by-default-in-gcc-14/27390>
>  <https://lists.debian.org/debian-gcc/2023/04/msg00015.html>
>  <https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/factory@lists.opensuse.org/thread/5OL76NH5AX75WOTZ43O3ZF2JOS3ABBXL/#QZLCA5YPN5CWSS7BCC6TNBC6N7RFTW7J>
> 
> (I tried to contact Arch, but my message didn't make it past the
> moderators, it seems.)
> 
> All in all, the whole situation is not great, but it still seems
> manageable to me.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading this far.
> 
> I would like to suggest to turn implicit-int,
> implicit-function-declaration, and possibly int-conversion from warnings
> into errors for GCC 14.  This would give upstream projects roughly
> another year to make new releases with compatibility fixes that have
> been contributed so far.  I do not think waiting longer, until GCC 15,
> would make a meaningful difference because any upstream project that
> does not release within the next 12 months is not likely to release in
> the next 24 months, either.
> 
> Regarding mechanics of the necessary opt out facility, Clang used
> -Werror=… by default, but that seems a bit hackish to me.  Presently, we
> cannot use -std=gnu89 etc. to opt out because there are packages which
> require both C89-only language features and C99-style inlining, which is
> currently not a combination supported by GCC (but maybe that could be
> changed).  Some build systems do not treat CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS as fully
> separate, and a flag approach that works for C and C++ without
> introducing any new warnings would be most convenient.  So maybe we
> could use -fpermissive for C as well.
> 
> One fairly big GCC-internal task is to clear up the C test suite so that
> it passes with the new compiler defaults.  I already have an offer of
> help for that, so I think we can complete this work in a reasonable time
> frame.
> 
> I have no data how big the compatibility impact of turning
> incompatible-pointer-types into errors will be.  For now, int-conversion
> has higher priority.  However, it looks like another change that could
> benefit developers (the first group).
> 
> I do not plan to work specifically on C2X compatibility fixes for now
> (to support bool-as-keyword, for example), but I could imagine a similar
> project a few years from now, fewer than 25 hopefully, that would enable
> GCC to make the switch to C2X by default.
> 
> Thanks,
> Florian
>