Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 20 Sep 2005 18:17:37 +0100 | From | Russell King <> | Subject | Re: p = kmalloc(sizeof(*p), ) |
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On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 10:11:28AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk> wrote: > > > > Since some of the other major contributors to the kernel appear to > > also disagree with the statement, I think that the entry in > > CodingStyle must be removed. > > Nobody has put forward a decent reason for doing so. "I want to grep for > initialisations" is pretty pointless because a) it won't catch everything > anyway and b) most structures are allocated and initialised at a single > place and many of those which aren't should probably be converted to do > that anyway. > > The broader point is that you're trying to optimise for the wrong thing. > We should optimise for those who read code, not for those who write it. > > Every time I see such a type-unsafe allocation in a patch I have to go hunt > down the definition of the lhs. Which is sometimes in a header file, often > one which hasn't been indexed yet. Is a pita.
Well, as I've said, don't expect folk to change their style just because something has been decided privately amongst a small select group of folk (which is exactly what seems to have happened - maybe not intentionally.)
And don't expect subsystem maintainers to accept the new "style" guidelines without a fight.
However, if we really are concerned about type-unsafe allocation, we should be using something like Alan's suggestion, where the return type from the *alloc function is appropriately typed and not void *.
-- Russell King Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/ maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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