Why was mixing declarations and code forbidden up until C99? - c

I have recently become a teaching assistant for a university course which primarily teaches C. The course standardized on C90, mostly due to widespread compiler support. One of the very confusing concepts to C newbies with previous Java experience is the rule that variable declarations and code may not be intermingled within a block (compound statement).
This limitation was finally lifted with C99, but I wonder: does anybody know why it was there in the first place? Does it simplify variable scope analysis? Does it allow the programmer to specify at which points of program execution the stack should grow for new variables?
I assume the language designers wouldn't have added such a limitation if it had absolutely no purpose at all.

In the very beginning of C the available memory and CPU resources were really scarce. So it had to compile really fast with minimal memory requirements.
Therefore the C language has been designed to require only a very simple compiler which compiles fast. This in turn lead to "single-pass compiler" concept: The compiler reads the source-file and translates everything into assembler code as soon as possible - usually while reading the source file. For example: When the compiler reads the definition of a global variable the appropriate code is emitted immediately.
This trait is visible in C up until today:
C requires "forward declarations" of all and everything. A multi-pass compiler could look forward and deduce the declarations of variables of functions in the same file by itself.
This in turn makes the *.h files necessary.
When compiling a function, the layout of the stack frame must be computed as soon as possible - otherwise the compiler had to do several passes over the function body.
Nowadays no serious C compiler is still "single pass", because many important optimizations cannot be done within one pass. A little bit more can be found in Wikipedia.
The standard body lingered for quite some time to relax that "single-pass" point in regard to the function body. I assume, that other things were more important.

It was that way because it had always been done that way, it made writing compilers a little easier, and nobody had really thought of doing it any other way. In time people realised that it was more important to favour making life easier for language users rather than compiler writers.
I assume the language designers wouldn't have added such a limitation if it had absolutely no purpose at all.
Don't assume that the language designers set out to restrict the language. Often restrictions like this arise by chance and circumstance.

I guess it should be easier for a non-optimising compiler to produce efficient code this way:
int a;
int b;
int c;
...
Although 3 separate variables are declared, the stack pointer can be incremented at once without optimising strategies such as reordering, etc.
Compare this to:
int a;
foo();
int b;
bar();
int c;
To increment the stack pointer just once, this requires a kind of optimisation, although not a very advanced one.
Moreover, as a stylistic issue, the first approach encourages a more disciplined way of coding (no wonder that Pascal too enforces this) by being able to see all the local variables at one place and eventually inspect them together as a whole. This provides a clearer separation between code and data.

Requiring that variables declarations appear at the start of a compound statement did not impair the expressiveness of C89. Anything that one could legitimately do using a mid-block declaration could be done just as well by adding an open-brace before the declaration and doubling up the closing brace of the enclosing block. While such a requirement may sometimes have cluttered source code with extra opening and closing braces, such braces would not have been just noise--they would have marked the beginning and end of variables' scopes.
Consider the following two code examples:
{
do_something_1();
{
int foo;
foo = something1();
if (foo) do_something_1(foo);
}
{
int bar;
bar = something2();
if (bar) do_something_2(bar);
}
{
int boz;
boz = something3();
if (boz) do_something_3(boz);
}
}
and
{
do_something_1();
int foo;
foo = something1();
if (foo) do_something_1(foo);
int bar;
bar = something2();
if (bar) do_something_2(bar);
int boz;
boz = something3();
if (boz) do_something_3(boz);
}
From a run-time perspective, most modern compilers probably wouldn't care about whether foo is syntactically in scope during the execution of do_something3(), since it could determine that any value it held before that statement would not be used after. On the other hand, encouraging programmers to write declarations in a way which would generate sub-optimal code in the absence of an optimizing compiler is hardly an appealing concept.
Further, while handling the simpler cases involving intermixed variable declarations would not be difficult (even a 1970's compiler could have done it, if the authors wanted to allow such constructs), things become more complicated if the block which contains intermixed declarations also contains any goto or case labels. The creators of C probably thought allowing intermixing of variable declarations and other statements would complicate the standards too much to be worth the benefit.

Back in the days of C youth, when Dennis Ritchie worked on it, computers (PDP-11 for example) have very limited memory (e.g. 64K words), and the compiler had to be small, so it had to optimize very few things and very simply. And at that time (I coded in C on Sun-4/110 in the 1986-89 era), declaring register variables was really useful for the compiler.
Today's compilers are much more complex. For example, a recent version of GCC (4.6) has more 5 or 10 million lines of source code (depending upon how you measure it), and does a big lot of optimizations which did not existed when the first C compilers appeared.
And today's processors are also very different (you cannot suppose that today's machines are just like machines from the 1980s, but thousands of times faster and with thousands times more RAM and disk). Today, the memory hierarchy is very important: cache misses are what the processor does the most (waiting for data from RAM). But in the 1980s access to memory was almost as fast (or as slow, by current standards) than execution of a single machine instruction. This is completely false today: to read your RAM module, your processor may have to wait for several hundreds of nanoseconds, while for data in L1 cache, it can execute more that one instruction each nanosecond.
So don't think of C as a language very close to the hardware: this was true in the 1980s, but it is false today.

Oh, but you could (in a way) mix declarations and code, but declaring new variables was limited to the start of a block. For example, the following is valid C89 code:
void f()
{
int a;
do_something();
{
int b = do_something_else();
}
}

Related

How consistently C compilers optimize unreachable code?

Say you have (for reasons that are not important here) the following code:
int k = 0;
... /* no change to k can happen here */
if (k) {
do_something();
}
Using the -O2 flag, GCC will not generate any code for it, recognizing that the if test is always false.
I'm wondering if this is a pretty common behaviour across compilers or it is something I should not rely on.
Does anybody knows?
Dead code elimination in this case is trivial to do for any modern optimizing compiler. I would definitely rely on it, given that optimizations are turned on and you are absolutely sure that the compiler can prove that the value is zero at the moment of check.
However, you should be aware that sometimes your code has more potential side effects than you think.
The first source of problems is calling non-inlined functions. Whenever you call a function which is not inlined (i.e. because its definition is located in another translation unit), compiler assumes that all global variables and the whole contents of the heap may change inside this call. Local variables are the lucky exception, because compiler knows that it is illegal to modify them indirectly... unless you save the address of a local variable somewhere. For instance, in this case dead code won't be eliminated:
int function_with_unpredictable_side_effects(const int &x);
void doit() {
int k = 0;
function_with_unpredictable_side_effects(k);
if (k)
printf("Never reached\n");
}
So compiler has to do some work and may fail even for local variables. By the way, I believe the problem which is solved in this case is called escape analysis.
The second source of problems is pointer aliasing: compiler has to take into account that all sort of pointers and references in your code may be equal, so changing something via one pointer may change the contents at the other one. Here is one example:
struct MyArray {
int num;
int arr[100];
};
void doit(int idx) {
MyArray x;
x.num = 0;
x.arr[idx] = 7;
if (x.num)
printf("Never reached\n");
}
Visual C++ compiler does not eliminate the dead code, because it thinks that you may access x.num as x.arr[-1]. It may sound like an awful thing to do to you, but this compiler has been used in gamedev area for years, and such hacks are not uncommon there, so the compiler stays on the safe side. On the other hand, GCC removes the dead code. Maybe it is related to its exploitation of strict pointer aliasing rule.
P.S. The const keywork is never used by optimizer, it is only present in C/C++ language for programmers' convenience.
There is no pretty common behaviour across compilers. But there is a way to explore how different compilers acts with specific part of code.
Compiler explorer will help you to answer on every question about code generation, but of course you must be familiar with assembler language.

Return a struct directly or fill a pointer?

Let's say I have the following function to initialize a data structure:
void init_data(struct data *d) {
d->x = 5;
d->y = 10;
}
However, with the following code:
struct data init_data(void) {
struct data d = { 5, 10 };
return d;
}
Wouldn't this be optimized away due to copy elision and be just as performant as the former version?
I tried to do some tests on godbolt to see if the assembly was the same, but when using any optimization flags everything was always entirely optimized away, with nothing left but something like this: movabsq $42949672965, %rax, and I am not sure if the same would happen in real code.
The first version I provided seems to be very common in C libraries, and I do not understand why as they should be both just as fast with RVO, with the latter requiring less code.
The first version I provided seems to be very common in C libraries, and I do not understand why as they should be both just as fast with
RVO, with the latter requiring less code.
The main reason for the first being so common is historic. The second way of initializing structures from literals was not standard (well, it was, but only for static initializers and never for automatic variables) and it's never allowed on assignments (well, I've not checked the status of the recent standards) Even, in ancient C, a simple assignment as:
struct A a, b;
...
a = b; /* this was not allowed a long time ago */
was not accepted at all.
So, in order to be able to compile code in every platform, you have to write the old way, as normally, modern compilers allow you to compile legacy code, while the opposite (old compilers accepting new code) is not possible.
And this also applies to returning structures or passing them by value. Apart of being normally a huge waste of resources (it's common to see the whole structure being copied in the stack or copied back to the proper place, once the function returns) old compilers didn't accept these, so to be portable, you must avoid to use these constructs.
Finally a comment: don't use your compiler to check if both constructs generate the same code, as probably it does... but you'll get the wrong assumption that this is common, and you'll run into error. Another different implementation can (and is allowed to do) different translation and result in different code.

C99 mixed declarations and code in open source projects?

Why is still C99 mixed declarations and code not used in open source C projects like the Linux kernel or GNOME?
I really like mixed declarations and code since it makes the code more readable and prevents hard to see bugs by restricting the scope of the variables to the narrowest possible. This is recommended by Google for C++.
For example, Linux requires at least GCC 3.2 and GCC 3.1 has support for C99 mixed declarations and code
You don't need mixed declaration and code to limit scope. You can do:
{
int c;
c = 1;
{
int d = c + 1;
}
}
in C89. As for why these projects haven't used mixed declarations (assuming this is true), it's most likely a case of "If it ain't broke don't fix it."
This is an old question but I'm going to suggest that inertia is the reason that most of these projects still use ANSI C declarations rules.
However there are a number of other possibilities, ranging from valid to ridiculous:
Portability. Many open source projects work under the assumption that pedantic ANSI C is the most portable way to write software.
Age. Many of these projects predate the C99 spec and the authors may prefer a consistent coding style.
Ignorance. The programmers submitting predate C99 and are unaware of the benefits of mixed declarations and code. (Alternate interpretation: Developers are fully aware of the potential tradeoffs and decide that mixed declarations and statements are not worth the effort. I highly disagree, but it's rare that two programmers will agree on anything.)
FUD. Programmers view mixed declarations and code as a "C++ism" and dislike it for that reason.
There is little reason to rewrite the Linux kernel to make cosmetic changes that offer no performance gains.
If the code base is working, so why change it for cosmetic reasons?
There is no benefit. Declaring all variables at the beginning of the function (pascal like) is much more clear, in C89 you can also declare variables at the beginning of each scope (inside loops example) which is both practical and concise.
I don't remember any interdictions against this in the style guide for kernel code. However, it does say that functions should be as small as possible, and only do one thing. This would explain why a mixture of declarations and code is rare.
In a small function, declaring variables at the start of scope acts as a sort of Introit, telling you something about what's coming soon after. In this case the movement of the variable declaration is so limited that it would likely either have no effect, or serve to hide some information about the functionality by pushing the barker into the crowd, so to speak. There is a reason that the arrival of a king was declared before he entered a room.
OTOH, a function which must mix variables and code to be readable is probably too big. This is one of the signs (along with too-nested blocks, inline comments and other things) that some sections of a function need to be abstracted into separate functions (and declared static, so the optimizer can inline them).
Another reason to keep declarations at the beginning of the functions: should you need to reorder the execution of statements in the code, you may move a variable out of its scope without realizing it, since the scope of a variable declared in the middle of code is not evident in the indentation (unless you use a block to show the scope). This is easily fixed, so it's just an annoyance, but new code often undergoes this kind of transformation, and annoyance can be cumulative.
And another reason: you might be tempted to declare a variable to take the error return code from a function, like so:
void_func();
int ret = func_may_fail();
if (ret) { handle_fail(ret) }
Perfectly reasonable thing to do. But:
void_func();
int ret = func_may_fail();
if (ret) { handle_fail(ret) }
....
int ret = another_func_may_fail();
if (ret) { handle_other_fail(ret); }
Ooops! ret is defined twice. "So? Remove the second declaration." you say. But this makes the code asymmetric, and you end up with more refactoring limitations.
Of course, I mix declarations and code myself; no reason to be dogmatic about it (or else your karma may run over your dogma :-). But you should know what the concomitant problems are.
Maybe it's not needed, maybe the separation is good? I do it in C++, which has this feature as well.
There is no reason to change the code away like this, and C99 is still not widely supported by compilers. It is mostly about portability.

How do I know if gcc agrees that something is volatile?

Consider the following:
volatile uint32_t i;
How do I know if gcc did or did not treat i as volatile? It would be declared as such because no nearby code is going to modify it, and modification of it is likely due to some interrupt.
I am not the world's worst assembly programmer, but I play one on TV. Can someone help me to understand how it would differ?
If you take the following stupid code:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <inttypes.h>
volatile uint32_t i;
int main(void)
{
if (i == 64738)
return 0;
else
return 1;
}
Compile it to object format and disassemble it via objdump, then do the same after removing 'volatile', there is no difference (according to diff). Is the volatile declaration just too close to where its checked or modified or should I just always use some atomic type when declaring something volatile? Do some optimization flags influence this?
Note, my stupid sample does not fully match my question, I realize this. I'm only trying to find out if gcc did or did not treat the variable as volatile, so I'm studying small dumps to try to find the difference.
Many compilers in some situations don't treat volatile the way they should. See this paper if you deal much with volatiles to avoid nasty surprises: Volatiles are Miscompiled, and What to Do about It. It also contains the pretty good description of the volatile backed with the quotations from the standard.
To be 100% sure, and for such a simple example check out the assembly output.
Try setting the variable outside a loop and reading it inside the loop. In a non-volatile case, the compiler might (or might not) shove it into a register or make it a compile time constant or something before the loop, since it "knows" it's not going to change, whereas if it's volatile it will read it from the variable space every time through the loop.
Basically, when you declare something as volatile, you're telling the compiler not to make certain optimizations. If it decided not to make those optimizations, you don't know that it didn't do them because it was declared volatile, or just that it decided it needed those registers for something else, or it didn't notice that it could turn it into a compile time constant.
As far as I know, volatile helps the optimizer. For example, if your code looked like this:
int foo() {
int x = 0;
while (x);
return 42;
}
The "while" loop would be optimized out of the binary.
But if you define 'x' as being volatile (ie, volatile int x;), then the compiler will leave the loop alone.
Your little sample is inadequate to show anything. The difference between a volatile variable and one that isn't is that each load or store in the code has to generate precisely one load or store in the executable for a volatile variable, whereas the compiler is free to optimize away loads or stores of non-volatile variables. If you're getting one load of i in your sample, that's what I'd expect for volatile and non-volatile.
To show a difference, you're going to have to have redundant loads and/or stores. Try something like
int i = 5;
int j = i + 2;
i = 5;
i = 5;
printf("%d %d\n", i, j);
changing i between non-volatile and volatile. You may have to enable some level of optimization to see the difference.
The code there has three stores and two loads of i, which can be optimized away to one store and probably one load if i is not volatile. If i is declared volatile, all stores and loads should show up in the object code in order, no matter what the optimization. If they don't, you've got a compiler bug.
It should always treat it as volatile.
The reason the code is the same is that volatile just instructs the compiler to load the variable from memory each time it accesses it. Even with optimization on, the compiler still needs to load i from memory once in the code you've written, because it can't infer the value of i at compile time. If you access it repeatedly, you'll see a difference.
Any modern compiler has multiple stages. One of the fairly easy yet interesting questions is whether the declaration of the variable itself was parsed correctly. This is easy because the C++ name mangling should differ depending on the volatile-ness. Hence, if you compile twice, once with volatile defined away, the symbol tables should differ slightly.
Read the standard before you misquote or downvote. Here's a quote from n2798:
7.1.6.1 The cv-qualifiers
7 Note: volatile is a hint to the implementation to avoid aggressive optimization involving the object because the value of the object might be changed by means undetectable by an implementation. See 1.9 for detailed semantics. In general, the semantics of volatile are intended to be the same in C++ as they are in C.
The keyword volatile acts as a hint. Much like the register keyword. However, volatile asks the compiler to keep all its optimizations at bay. This way, it won't keep a copy of the variable in a register or a cache (to optimize speed of access) but rather fetch it from the memory everytime you request for it.
Since there is so much of confusion: some more. The C99 standard does in fact say that a volatile qualified object must be looked up every time it is read and so on as others have noted. But, there is also another section that says that what constitutes a volatile access is implementation defined. So, a compiler, which knows the hardware inside out, will know, for example, when you have an automatic volatile qualified variable and whose address is never taken, that it will not be put in a sensitive region of memory and will almost certainly ignore the hint and optimize it away.
This keyword finds usage in setjmp and longjmp type of error handling. The only thing you have to bear in mind is that: You supply the volatile keyword when you think the variable may change. That is, you could take an ordinary object and manage with a few casts.
Another thing to keep in mind is the definition of what constitutes a volatile access is left by standard to the implementation.
If you really wanted different assembly compile with optimization

When is "inline" ineffective? (in C)

Some people love using inline keyword in C, and put big functions in headers. When do you consider this to be ineffective? I consider it sometime even annoying, because it is unusual.
My principle is that inline should be used for small functions accessed very frequently, or in order to have real type checking. Anyhow, my taste guide me, but I am not sure how to explain best the reasons why inline is not so useful for big functions.
In this question people suggest that the compiler can do a better job at guessing the right thing to do. That was also my assumption. When I try to use this argument, people reply it does not work with functions coming from different objects. Well, I don't know (for example, using GCC).
Thanks for your answers!
inline does two things:
gives you an exemption from the "one definition rule" (see below). This always applies.
Gives the compiler a hint to avoid a function call. The compiler is free to ignore this.
#1 Can be very useful (e.g. put definition in header if short) even if #2 is disabled.
In practice compilers often do a better job of working out what to inline themselves (especially if profile guided optimisation is available).
[EDIT: Full References and relevant text]
The two points above both follow from the ISO/ANSI standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E), commonly known as "C99").
In §6.9 "External Definition", paragraph 5:
An external definition is an external declaration that is also a definition of a function (other than an inline definition) or an object. If an identifier declared with external linkage is used in an expression (other than as part of the operand of a sizeof operator whose result is an integer constant), somewhere in the entire program there shall be exactly one external definition for the identifier; otherwise, there shall be no more than one.
While the equalivalent definition in C++ is explictly named the One Definition Rule (ODR) it serves the same purpose. Externals (i.e. not "static", and thus local to a single Translation Unit -- typically a single source file) can only be defined once only unless it is a function and inline.
In §6.7.4, "Function Specifiers", the inline keyword is defined:
Making a function an inline function suggests that calls to the function be as
fast as possible.[118] The extent to which such suggestions are effective is
implementation-defined.
And footnote (non-normative), but provides clarification:
By using, for example, an alternative to the usual function call mechanism, such as ‘‘inline substitution’’. Inline substitution is not textual substitution, nor does it create a new function. Therefore, for example, the expansion of a macro used within the body of the function uses the definition it had at the point the function body appears, and not where the function is called; and identifiers refer to the declarations in scope where the body occurs. Likewise, the function has a single address, regardless of the number of inline definitions that occur in addition to the external definition.
Summary: what most users of C and C++ expect from inline is not what they get. Its apparent primary purpose, to avoid functional call overhead, is completely optional. But to allow separate compilation, a relaxation of single definition is required.
(All emphasis in the quotes from the standard.)
EDIT 2: A few notes:
There are various restrictions on external inline functions. You cannot have a static variable in the function, and you cannot reference static TU scope objects/functions.
Just seen this on VC++'s "whole program optimisation", which is an example of a compiler doing its own inline thing, rather than the author.
The important thing about an inline declaration is that it doesn't necessarily do anything. A compiler is free to decide to, in many cases, to inline a function not declared so, and to link functions which are declared inline.
Another reason why you shouldn't use inline for large functions, is in the case of libraries. Every time you change the inline functions, you might loose ABI compatibility because the application compiled against an older header, has still inlined the old version of the function. If inline functions are used as a typesafe macro, chances are great that the function never needs to be changed in the life cycle of the library. But for big functions this is hard to guarantee.
Of course, this argument only applies if the function is part of your public API.
An example to illustrate the benefits of inline. sinCos.h :
int16 sinLUT[ TWO_PI ];
static inline int16_t cos_LUT( int16_t x ) {
return sin_LUT( x + PI_OVER_TWO )
}
static inline int16_t sin_LUT( int16_t x ) {
return sinLUT[(uint16_t)x];
}
When doing some heavy number crunching and you want to avoid wasting cycles on computing sin/cos you replace sin/cos with a LUT.
When you compile without inline the compiler will not optimize the loop and the output .asm will show something along the lines of :
;*----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
;* SOFTWARE PIPELINE INFORMATION
;* Disqualified loop: Loop contains a call
;*----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
When you compile with inline the compiler has knowledge about what happens in the loop and will optimize because it knows exactly what is happening.
The output .asm will have an optimized "pipelined" loop ( i.e. it will try to fully utilize all the processor's ALUs and try to keep the processor's pipeline full without NOPS).
In this specific case, I was able to increase my performance by about 2X or 4X which got me within what I needed for my real time deadline.
p.s. I was working on a fixed point processor... and any floating point operations like sin/cos killed my performance.
Inline is ineffective when you use the pointer to function.
Inline is effective in one case: when you've got a performance problem, ran your profiler with real data, and found the function call overhead for some small functions to be significant.
Outside of that, I can't imagine why you'd use it.
That's right. Using inline for big functions increases compile time, and brings little extra performance to the application. Inline functions are used to tell the compiler that a function is to be included without a call, and such should be small code repeated many times. In other words: for big functions, the cost of making the call compared to the cost of the own function implementation is negligible.
I mainly use inline functions as typesafe macros. There's been talk about adding support for link-time optimizations to GCC for quite some time, especially since LLVM came along. I don't know how much of it actually has been implemented yet, though.
Personally I don't think you should ever inline, unless you have first run a profiler on your code and have proven that there is a significant bottleneck on that routine that can be partially alleviated by inlining.
This is yet another case of the Premature Optimization Knuth warned about.
Inline can be used for small and frequently used functions such as getter or setter method. For big functions it is not advisable to use inline as it increases the exe size.
Also for recursive functions, even if you make inline, the compiler will ignore it.
inline acts as a hint only.
Added only very recently. So works with only the latest standard compliant compilers.
Inline functions should be approximately 10 lines or less, give or take, depending on your compiler of choice.
You can tell your compiler that you want something inlined .. its up to the compiler to do so. There is no -force-inline option that I know of which the compiler can't ignore. That is why you should look at the assembler output and see if your compiler actually did inline the function, if not, why not? Many compilers just silently say 'screw you!' in that respect.
so if:
static inline unsigned int foo(const char *bar)
.. does not improve things over static int foo() its time to revisit your optimizations (and likely loops) or argue with your compiler. Take special care to argue with your compiler first, not the people who develop it.. or your just in store for lots of unpleasant reading when you open your inbox the next day.
Meanwhile, when making something (or attempting to make something) inline, does doing so actually justify the bloat? Do you really want that function expanded every time its called? Is the jump so costly?, your compiler is usually correct 9/10 times, check the intermediate output (or asm dumps).

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