On 3/12/18, Myria <myriachan@gmail.com> wrote:
> The severity of the current situation is that I generally avoid signed
> integers if I intend to do any arithmetic on them whatsoever, lest the
> compiler decide to make demons come out of my nose.
So why not specify the option to turn on trapping?
> And even then, I'm not safe:
>
> std::uint16_t x = 0xFFFF;
> x *= x; // undefined behavior on most modern platforms
How? The C++ standard defines unsigned arithmetic as
modular arithmetic.
But that's the catch: it's double secret signed arithmetic. The promotion rules of C, inherited by C++, state that on any arithmetic operation, integer types of rank less than int promote to int. This promotion is regardless of signedness.
On a "typical modern platform", std::uint16_t is unsigned short. That is of lesser rank than signed int, so it promotes to signed int on any arithmetic operation, resulting in the following:
int promoted_x = x;
x = static_cast<std::uint16_t>(promoted_x * promoted_x);
65535 * 65535 overflows a signed int on a typical 32-bit int platform, which is undefined behavior.
More importantly, what happens to your program when x*x < x?
The code that led me to finding this was a 16-bit variant of the FNV hash function, so it worked properly after the correct casts were added to allow the wrap.
> My code has to do silly things like this in order to safeguard against
> such potential compiler abuses:
>
> typedef decltype(std::uint16_t() + 0u) promoted_uint16;
How does this typedef help?
Arithmetic between any unsigned type and unsigned int results in a type of at least the first type's size that cannot be promoted to a signed type in arithmetic with other unsigned types.
It's like uint16_fast_t, except that it guarantees that all operations performed will be well-defined to wrap, with just the inconvenience of potentially being larger than the actual intended type.
> I would be happy if an option like -fwrapv were supported everywhere,
> but Visual Studio doesn't have such an option, and Microsoft has
> already denied requests for such an option to be implemented.
What about -ftrapv?
If I were working on something where signed int overflow were a problem, then sure, in debug builds. In release builds, I wouldn't use that for performance reasons (except where it's mostly free, like on MIPS).
Melissa