RFR-8008118

[Christos Zoulas]

On Apr 10, 11:54am, martinrb at google.com (Martin Buchholz) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: RFR-8008118

| > 1. We did we switch from NEW() to xmalloc()? Why is the xmalloc cast
| > needed?
| 
| NEW is for allocating homogeneous arrays, but here the memory block is
| being used for both chars and pointers.

I did not know that. Why the cast though? xmalloc() returns void *, no?
Extraneous casts are bad because they hide conversion errors. For example,
if you don't have the xmalloc prototype in scope, without the cast you
get a warning of casting integer to pointer of different size. With
the cast you get the wrong data assigned to the pointer.

| > 2. I would not declare pathv "const char **", but "char **", and then
| >    cast the return if needed. This will make life easier in the future
| >    if we decide to turn on warnings about const-castaways.
| >
| >
| I believe the current code doesn't cast away const and doesn't write to
| const.  The only cast is to the return from xmalloc, which is expected.
|  What might a compiler warn about?

It is casting away const before the memcpy:

+    p = (char *) pathv + pathvsize;

Try to compile with -Wcast-qual.

christos