Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Johnson, Andrew N." <[email protected]> · Thu, 4 Oct 2018 15:36:01 +0000

On 10/03/2018 05:47 PM, Michael Davidsaver wrote:
> On 10/3/18 1:55 PM, Johnson, Andrew N. wrote:
>> I have no reason to doubt your statement. I am just wary of this topic given the amount of code we have that casts pointers between dbCommon, void* and/or some specific record type.
> 
> I'm not suggesting that we ignore these potential problems.
> I just don't expect to discover major new problems of this
> sort arising with older compilers.

Admittedly Dirk may have been talking about older compilers; I was
thinking about newer ones when I wrote "the latest language rules".

> If I was going to spend time on compiler testing, it would be with newer
> gcc/clang (and libc for that matter).  We know from past experience that
> new issues will arise in this area.

At some point we might want to try and create tests to look for problems
that might be caused by compiler aliasing in the kinds of code
constructs and casts that we commonly use. I don't see these tests as a
high priority though.

> eg. it's been in the back of my mind to build Base with latest gcc 8.x on travis-ci.
> 
> https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-toolchain-r/+archive/ubuntu/test
> 
> https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu-toolchain-r-test+travis-ci

I don't know what gcc version(s) you run, but Red Hat provides builds of
binutils and and gcc-7 for RHEL and I have run the Base-7 self-tests
against those with no failures — gcc 7.2.1 20170829 (Red Hat 7.2.1-1)
and binutils 2.28 to be specific (there's even an ld.gold there, but I
haven't tried it). They don't have a devtoolset-8 yet to my knowledge.

- Andrew

>> I may have been reading this blog post or some of the items it links to: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1621
>>
>> - Andrew
>>
>> -- 
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Oct 3, 2018, at 1:49 PM, Michael Davidsaver <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/3/18 11:07 AM, Johnson, Andrew N. wrote:
>>>> Did I read recently that apparently even the use of a union (as shown by
>>>> Ben at the end of that thread) is no longer guaranteed to prevent
>>>> problems with the latest language rules? *That* would be somewhat
>>>> worrying if true...

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System