Re: [PATCH 01/12] staging: lustre: fid: Use !x to check for kzalloc failure

Dan Carpenter
2015-06-23T09:57:04Z

Yes. I know Al's thoughts and kernel style.

But Alan Cox and Andreas have both said they think (x = NULL) can help
you avoid some kind of boolean vs pointer bugs. I've had co-workers who
did massive seds changing !foo to foo = NULL on our code base. But
I've never seen a real life example of a bug this fixes.

To be honest, I've never seen a real life proof that (!foo) code is less
buggy. I should look through the kbuild mailbox... Hm... But my other
idea of setting up code style readability testing website is also a good
one.

Linux kernel style is based on Joe Perches finding that 80% of the code
prefers one way or the other. That's a valid method for determining
code style. I bet it normally picks the more readable style but it
would be interesting to measure it more formally.

regards,
dan carpenter