Messages in this thread | | * Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> > So I think we should consider it a syntactic construct to avoid. > > Unused variables are relatively harmless compared to used-uninitialized > variables that are always bugs (though they are provably impossible to > detect correctly in some cases).
So the thing I was most worried about was that old GCC used to not warn about:
long __maybe_unused error;
...
if (error) return error;
... but recent GCC does warn if it's certain that the use is uninitialized, so the scenario I outlined should not happen.
But it will supress the warning if the variable is uninitialized but GCC cannot prove it for sure, so my point remains that it's a potentially dangerous construct.
Thanks,
Ingo
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