[cfe-dev] RFC: Nullability qualifiers

[Jonathan Schleifer]

Am 14.06.2015 um 21:39 schrieb Richard Smith <richard at metafoo.co.uk>:

> __nonnull is defined as a function-like macro, so any use that is not followed by a ( will work fine. That makes the portability problem significantly less severe.

Hm, indeed, weird. I got some errors about not giving it enough arguments, however, I can't reproduce what I did there.

> That seems like an odd way to deal with that portability problem. The conventional way is:
> 

> #if __has_feature(nullability)
> #define NONNULL __nonnull
> #else
> #define NONNULL
> #endif
> 
> ... which again works without problems so long as you don't follow NONNULL with a left parenthesis.

I disagree about this being odd. As a counter example, restrict was added in C99. #define restrict was a very common thing to make sure it still compiles as C89.

As for using a hack with a define, this is what I did for now. Still, it's a hack and makes all declarations look ugly and weird. Wouldn't it be much nicer to have a keyword that you can just define to nothing for backwards compatibility, like with restrict? (That does not mean we can't keep __nonnull in addition to another name on OS X / iOS, so it would not break any existing code).

I wonder if it makes sense to bring up this issue with the glibc maintainers as well?

--
Jonathan