Optimizations and undefined behavior

Optimizations and undefined behavior

Posted Jul 30, 2009 13:38 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Optimizations and undefined behavior by BrucePerens
Parent article: Fun with NULL pointers, part 1

The problem with fsync() is that it's semantics resemble whery much the one of "PLEASE" in INTERCAL, which means it is a joke. fsync() basically has no semantics, except "make it so" (make it persistent now). Now, all file system operations are persistent, anyway, just not made persistent now. You can't properly test (that is: automated), because to test if there's a missing fsync(), you have to force an unexpected reboot, and then check if there's any missing data. What's worse: A number of popular Unix programming languages don't even have fsync(), starting with all kinds of shell scripts. fsync() is a dirty hack introduced into Unix because of broken (but extremely fast) file system implementations.

We know that Unix is a joke for quite some time, but parts of the API like fsync() show that this is not so far away from the truth ;-). From the kernel development side it is always "easier" to maintain a sloppy specification and blame the loser, but that's the wrong thinking. You are providing a service. Same thing for GCC: Compiler writers provide a service. Using a sloppy specification for questionable "optimizations" is wrong, as well. If the compiler writer can't know that the code really will break when accessing the NULL pointer, then he can't take the test out after having accessed an object. I remember GCC taking out tests like if(x+n>x), because overflows are said to be unspecified in the C language, but compiling code to a machine where overflows were very specifically handled as wraparounds in two's complement representation. This is all wrong thinking.

---

(Log in to post comments)