Re: [GIT] Networking

Linus Torvalds
2015-09-03T18:31:43Z

On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> [-Wsizeof-array-argument]

Ahh. Google shows that it's an old clang warning that gcc has recently
picked up.

But even clang doesn't seem to have any way for a project to say
"please warn about arrays in function argument declaration". It *is*
very traditional idiomatic C, it's just that I personally think it's
one of those bad traditional C things exactly because it's so
misleading about what actually goes on. But I guess that in practice,
the only thing that it actually *affects* is "sizeof" (and assignment
to the variable name - something that would be invalid for a real
array, but works on argument arrays because they are really just
pointers).

The "array as function argument" syntax is occasionally useful
(particularly for the multi-dimensional array case), so I very much
understand why it exists, I just think that in the kernel we'd be
better off with the rule that it's against our coding practices.

Linus