Re: [PATCH] removal of "static foo = 0"

Werner Almesberger
2000-11-26T06:51:58Z

Andries Brouwer wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 25, 2000 at 10:27:15PM +0000, Tigran Aivazian wrote:

I think it's a bad sign if people like the two of you start flaming
each other ...

On the issue of static int foo = 0; vs. static int foo; I'd agree
with Andries' view. It's a common enough idiom that it is useful to
convey the intentions of the programmer.

On "optimizing" changes: there are plenty of very ugly things you can
do to a C program to make source or object code smaller (e.g. use only
one-character identifiers for smaller code; re-use variables as much
as possible, maybe with casts for smaller stack footprint, etc.). We
usually avoid these too, so a few extra initializations in the source
shouldn't hurt.

On the .data segment size: if all the energy that went into this
thread would have gone into implementing a gcc option to move all-zero
.data objects to .bss, the technical side of the problem would be
solved already ;-)

> Does the kernel contain a bug? Panic! I don't think my alpha would
> have gotten an uptime of 1198 days under that paradigm.
> (I don't think you were serious, but still..)

Hmm, sometimes a panic _is_ the right answer, though. If a critical
subsystem just politely returns an error to user space and tries to
continue, it may take a while until somebody realizes that there's
something wrong at all ...

- Werner

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/ Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH Werner.Almesberger@epfl.ch /
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