On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 11:02:45AM -0800, Greg KH was heard to remark:
>
> > I'm not to clear on what "sparse" can do; however, in the good old days,
> > gcc allowed you to commit great sins when passing "struct blah *" to
> > subroutines, whereas it stoped you cold if you tried the same trick
> > with a typedef'ed "blah_t *". This got me into the habit of turning
> > all structs into typedefs in my personal projects. Can we expect
> > something similar for the kernel, and in particular, should we start
> > typedefing structs now?
>
> No, never typedef a struct. That's just wrong.
Its a defacto convention for most C-language apps, see, for
example Xlib, gtk and gnome. Also, "grep typedef include/linux/*"
shows that many kernel device drivers use this convention.
> gcc should warn you
> just the same if you pass the wrong struct pointer
There were many cases where it did not warn (I don't remember
the case of subr calls). I beleive this had to do with ANSI-C spec
issues dating to the 1990's; traditional C is weakly typed.
Its not just gcc; anyoe who coded for a while eventually discovered
that tyedefs where strongly typed, but "struct blah *" were not.
> (and all of your code
> builds without warnings, right?)
:-/ Yes, of course.
--linas
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