48 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
48 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
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Undefined Behavior
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------------------
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In the C language, some operations are undefined, like signed integer overflow,
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dereferencing freed pointers, accessing outside allocated space, ...
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Undefined Behavior must not occur in a C program, it is not safe even if the
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output of undefined operations is unused. The unsafety may seem nit picking
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but Optimizing compilers have in fact optimized code on the assumption that
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no undefined Behavior occurs.
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Optimizing code based on wrong assumptions can and has in some cases lead to
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effects beyond the output of computations.
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The signed integer overflow problem in speed critical code
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----------------------------------------------------------
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Code which is highly optimized and works with signed integers sometimes has the
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problem that some (invalid) inputs can trigger overflows (undefined behavior).
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In these cases, often the output of the computation does not matter (as it is
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from invalid input).
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In some cases the input can be checked easily in others checking the input is
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computationally too intensive.
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In these remaining cases a unsigned type can be used instead of a signed type.
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unsigned overflows are defined in C.
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SUINT
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-----
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As we have above established there is a need to use "unsigned" sometimes in
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computations which work with signed integers (which overflow).
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Using "unsigned" for signed integers has the very significant potential to
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cause confusion
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as in
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unsigned a,b,c;
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...
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a+b*c;
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The reader does not expect b to be semantically -5 here and if the code is
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changed by maybe adding a cast, a division or other the signedness will almost
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certainly be mistaken.
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To avoid this confusion a new type was introduced, "SUINT" is the C "unsigned"
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type but it holds a signed "int".
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to use the same example
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SUINT a,b,c;
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...
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a+b*c;
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here the reader knows that a,b,c are meant to be signed integers but for C
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standard compliance / to avoid undefined behavior they are stored in unsigned
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ints.
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