[cfe-dev] auto-init of __builtin_alloca

[Marco Elver via cfe-dev]

[Resend - lists rejected previous mail]

Hello,

When -ftrivial-auto-var-init= is enabled, allocas unconditionally
receive auto-initialization since [1].

In certain cases, it turns out, this is causing problems [2], as it
causes significant overheads with no way to turn off that behaviour.

The more fundamental problem, that GCC devs pointed out to us [3], is
that an explicit __builtin_alloca() is not an "automatic variable",
which is also why GCC 12's behaviour of the same command-line option
diverges from Clang's behaviour.

As the command-line option's name suggestions, and also our
documentation [4] does point out that this is for "trivial automatic
stack variables".

>From all that, the conclusion appears to be that initializing
__builtin_alloca is out-of-scope of ftrivial-auto-var-init.

Without entirely reverting __builtin_alloca initialization, the cleanest
option appears to be introducing yet another -f<option> to enable
auto-init of allocas.

Another alternative is to entirely leave alloca() initialization to libc
definitions of alloca():

	// strawman
	static inline void *alloca(size_t size)
	{
		void *ret = alloca(size);
	#ifdef __ALLOCA_AUTO_INIT__
		memset(ret, 0, size);
	#endif
		return ret;
	}

Preferences?

Thanks,
	-- Marco

[1] https://reviews.llvm.org/D60548
[2] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/YbHTKUjEejZCLyhX@elver.google.com
[3] https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211209201616.GU614@gate.crashing.org
[4] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangCommandLineReference.html#cmdoption-clang-ftrivial-auto-var-init