[ntp:hackers] Recent C99-isms

Martin Burnicki martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Mon Jan 5 17:18:24 UTC 2015


Harlan Stenn wrote:
> Martin and Danny specifically, and everybody else in general,
>
> I am shooting for a non-public pre-release of 4.2.8p1 for late on Monday the
> 5th, with a public release late on Monday the 12th.
>
> The recent addition of a bunch of code cleanup from the NetBSD folks
> have introduced some C99-isms and I want to be sure that's OK.
>
> While the // comments should not be an issue for anybody because libopts
> (from Autogen) has been using them for a while, one of their other changes
> was to update the initialization of the VDC structure in ntpq-subs.c, to use
> C99's designated initializers.
>
> This seems to be a problem for VS2008 builds.  Is it an issue for anybody
> else?  I'm wondering about older Solaris machines in particular.
>
> Danny says that it looks to him that  HAVE_DNSREGISTRATION has been
> #defined, and he's having trouble building with that option with VS2008.
> He's also seeing a *lot* of refclocks being built by default now.
>
> While it won't be a huge problem if these issues are not resolved by Monday
> the 5th, the sooner they can be resolved the better, certainly before the
> 11th.

I've just tried to build the current bk -stable version under Windows 
with VS2008, and there is the problem with undefined __func__ which 
David Taylor has still reported. I've already a fix for this which David 
has also already tested successfully.

Beside this, there are the problems with the new structure 
initialization code which doesn't work for VS2008.

I'd really love to stick with VS2008 as default compiler for the Windows 
port since actually most Windows versions are shipped with the VS2008 
runtime, whereas the VS2013 runtime is only in less cases, AFAIK, and 
thus users of the precompiled binaries would have to install it first.

There are 2 different cases where the new structure initialization code 
is used.

One case is where only single members of a structure are set to 0 where 
a structure is instantiated. I've found 2 places:

in sntp/libopts/enum.c:
tOptDesc od = { .optIndex = NULL };

in sntp/libopts/autoopts.h:
arg_types_t argTypes = { .pzStr = NULL };

I suggest using more compatible code here which zeroes out the whole 
structure instead of the specific fields only, i.e.:

tOptDesc od = { 0 };
arg_types_t argTypes = { 0 };


The second way where C99-style initialization is used is in 
ntpq/ntpq-subs.c, where the local macro VDC_INIT is used to initialize 
structures of type vdc:

#define VDC_INIT(a, b, c) { .tag = a, .display = b, .type = c }

Since the fields tag, display, and type are the first 3 fields in vdc, 
in this order, we could

#define VDC_INIT(a, b, c) { a, b, c }

for compilers which don't accept the C99 style. This results in the same 
code as implemented earlier.

The question is if we should make the decision depending on a global 
define which has to be set, like

#if HAVE_C99_INIT_STYLE
# define VDC_INIT(a, b, c) { .tag = a, .display = b, .type = c }
#else
# define VDC_INIT(a, b, c) { a, b, c }
#endif

and take care that HAVE_C99_INIT_STYLE or whatever it is called is set 
up appropriately, or if we should check a specific compiler version here 
like

#if defined( _MSC_VER ) && ( _MSC_VER < xy )
# define VDC_INIT(a, b, c) { a, b, c }
#else
# define VDC_INIT(a, b, c) { .tag = a, .display = b, .type = c }
#endif

Personally I find the first way (HAVE_..., or MISSING_...) cleaner since 
it can easily be used in different places, and you can grep for it. 
However, eventually it requires more changes to determine the condition 
properly (by automake?).

If someone thinks it's more appropriate to zero out only specific fields 
of a structure then this could also be used there similarly.

Harlan, if you let me know what you prefer I can provide a patchset.

With either of these changes and a define for __func__ we can build both 
with VS2008 and VS2013.


Martin
-- 
Martin Burnicki

Senior Software Engineer

MEINBERG Funkuhren GmbH & Co. KG
Email: martin.burnicki at meinberg.de
Phone: +49 (0)5281 9309-14
Fax: +49 (0)5281 9309-30

Lange Wand 9, 31812 Bad Pyrmont, Germany
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