[PATCH] D58729: Emit boxed expression as a compile-time constant if the expression inside the parentheses is a string literal

[John McCall via Phabricator via cfe-commits]

rjmccall added inline comments.


================
Comment at: lib/Sema/SemaExprObjC.cpp:534
+            NSStringPointer, NSStringPointer);
+        return new (Context) ObjCBoxedExpr(SL, BoxedType, nullptr, SR);
+      }
----------------
ahatanak wrote:
> rjmccall wrote:
> > You're implicitly dropping sugar from the source expression here; I really think you should preserve that, and if it means you end up having to look through array-decay expressions, that's not the end of the world.
> > 
> > The need for a special case here is just to allow us to compile these even if there isn't a boxing method available?
> > 
> > Do you need to restrict the type of the string literal so that it doesn't apply to e.g. wide strings?
> Line 516 checks that the pointee type has the same unqualified type as 'char'. If the string literal inside the parentheses is of a wider type (e.g., `@(u"abc")`), this piece of code won't be executed, and a diagnostic is emitted later ("illegal type 'const char16_t *' used in a boxed expression").
> 
> The original motivation for special-casing string literals inside boxed expressions was to silence the `-Wnullable-to-nonnull-conversion` warning mentioned here: https://oleb.net/2018/@keypath/. The warning is issued because the return type of `stringWithUTF8String` is nullable.
> 
> ```
> ...
> + (nullable instancetype)stringWithUTF8String:(const char *)nullTerminatedCString;
> ...
> 
> NSString * _Nonnull ptr = @("abc");  // expected-error {{implicit conversion from nullable pointer 'NSString * _Nullable' to non-nullable pointer type 'NSString * _Nonnull'}}
> ```
I see.  So in addition to guaranteeing to skip the boxing call, you'd like to adjust the type to report the result as non-null, which we can do because we're unconditionally making a constant string.  Makes sense.

However, I think you need to check that the string is valid UTF-8 or else this is semantics-changing, since such strings are rejected by `+stringWithUTF8String:` (which is why it returns a nullable pointer at all).  It should be alright to warn about strings that are statically known to be invalid UTF-8, but you'll then need to emit them using the normal boxing method.


Repository:
  rC Clang

CHANGES SINCE LAST ACTION
  https://reviews.llvm.org/D58729/new/

https://reviews.llvm.org/D58729