[cfe-users] Clang9 UBSan and GMP

[David Blaikie via cfe-users]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 1:51 PM Hans Åberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:

>
> > On 31 Oct 2019, at 21:40, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 12:00 PM Hans Åberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > On 31 Oct 2019, at 18:40, David Blaikie <dblaikie at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> Right, but that is something one would avoid when computing
> arithmetical results.
> >> >
> >> > One would try to, yes - but that's sort of what the whole discussion
> is resolving around: Is the code correct? I don't know. I wouldn't assume
> it is (I'm not assuming it isn't either) - but without a reduced test case
> that gets to the root of the difference in behavior, we don't know if the
> code is correct.
> >>
> >> Nor whether it is a compiler bug.
> >
> > Indeed - but you can imagine that, on average (just due to there being
> way more code compiled by the compiler, than the code of the compiler
> itself) the bug is in external code, not the compiler.
>
> GMP is not the average program, though.
>
> > Such that it's not practical for the compiler developers to do all the
> leg work of investigating 3rd party code bugs to determine if it's a bug in
> the compiler. It doesn't scale/we wouldn't have any time to work on the
> compiler & most of the time we'd be finding user bugs, not compiler bugs.
>
> The GMP developers feel exactly the same, dropping Clang support. It is
> mostly a problem for MacOS users that do not have access to GCC.
>

Yep, that's certainly their call - there's a cost to maintaining
compatibility with each compiler/toolchain/platform, etc. If you have a
personal interest in GMP on MacOS, then perhaps the cost falls to you, if
you're willing to pay it, to investigate this sort of thing & help support
this particular library+compiler combination, if it's worth your time to do
so.


> > Apologies for the snark in the title of this article, but it covers some
> of the ideas:
> https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-first-rule-of-programming-its-always-your-fault/
> & other articles around discuss similar ideas.
>
> This article is pretty naive: Yes, it is a good starting point to check
> ones own code first, but eventually one learns to identify compiler bugs as
> well. It is very time consuming, though.
>

Certainly - which is why it's not practical for compiler engineers to be
spending all that time on everyone's bugs, right?


> > Yes, there are compiler bugs - but you've sort of got to continue under
> the assumption that that's not the issue until you've got some fairly
> compelling evidence of one (very narrow test case where you can look at all
> the code & visually inspect/discuss/reason about its standards conformance
> - currently "all of GMP" is too big to apply that level of scrutiny).
>
> GMP is indeed very complex, not only from a programming point of view, but
> also the underlying algorithms.
>

Yep - which makes it all the harder for me or someone else on the LLVM
project to likely be able to find any potential compiler bugs in it.

- Dave
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