Re: Using source-level annotations to help GCC detect buffer overflows

[David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>]

On 28/06/2021 21:06, Martin Sebor via Gcc wrote:
> I wrote an article for the Red Hat Developer blog about how
> to annotate code to get the most out of GCC's access checking
> warnings like -Warray-bounds, -Wformat-overflow, and
> -Wstringop-overflow.  The article published last week:
> 
> https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2021/06/25/use-source-level-annotations-help-gcc-detect-buffer-overflows
> 

Thanks for that write-up - and of course thank you to whoever
implemented these attributes!

The caveat that the access attributes are lost when a function is
inlined is an important one.  As a user who appreciates all the checks I
can get, it is disappointing - but I assume there are good reasons for
that limitation.  I can merely hope that will change in future gcc versions.

I believe it would make sense to add this information to the gcc manual
page for common function attributes.  There are quite a number of
attributes that are useful for static checking, such as
"warn_unused_result" and "nonnull".  Are these also dropped if the
function is inlined?