What are the common undefined/unspecified behavior for C that you run into? [closed]

Question

An example of unspecified behavior in the C language is the order of evaluation of arguments to a function. It might be left to right or right to left, you just don't know. This would affect how foo(c++, c) or foo(++c, c) gets evaluated.

What other unspecified behavior is there that can surprise the unaware programmer?

Answer 1

A language lawyer question. Hmkay.

My personal top3:

1. violating the strict aliasing rule

2. violating the strict aliasing rule

3. violating the strict aliasing rule

   :-)

Edit Here is a little example that does it wrong twice:

(assume 32 bit ints and little endian)

float funky_float_abs (float a) {   unsigned int temp = *(unsigned int *)&a;   temp &= 0x7fffffff;   return *(float *)&temp; } 

That code tries to get the absolute value of a float by bit-twiddling with the sign bit directly in the representation of a float.

However, the result of creating a pointer to an object by casting from one type to another is not valid C. The compiler may assume that pointers to different types don't point to the same chunk of memory. This is true for all kind of pointers except void* and char* (sign-ness does not matter).

In the case above I do that twice. Once to get an int-alias for the float a, and once to convert the value back to float.

There are three valid ways to do the same.

Use a char or void pointer during the cast. These always alias to anything, so they are safe.

float funky_float_abs (float a) {   float temp_float = a;   // valid, because it's a char pointer. These are special.   unsigned char * temp = (unsigned char *)&temp_float;   temp[3] &= 0x7f;   return temp_float; } 

Use memcopy. Memcpy takes void pointers, so it will force aliasing as well.

float funky_float_abs (float a) {   int i;   float result;   memcpy (&i, &a, sizeof (int));   i &= 0x7fffffff;   memcpy (&result, &i, sizeof (int));   return result; } 

The third valid way: use unions. This is explicitly not undefined since C99:

float funky_float_abs (float a) {   union    {      unsigned int i;      float f;   } cast_helper;    cast_helper.f = a;   cast_helper.i &= 0x7fffffff;   return cast_helper.f; } 

Answer 2

My personal favourite undefined behaviour is that if a non-empty source file doesn't end in a newline, behaviour is undefined.

I suspect it's true though that no compiler I will ever see has treated a source file differently according to whether or not it is newline terminated, other than to emit a warning. So it's not really something that will surprise unaware programmers, other than that they might be surprised by the warning.

So for genuine portability issues (which mostly are implementation-dependent rather than unspecified or undefined, but I think that falls into the spirit of the question):

• char is not necessarily (un)signed.
• int can be any size from 16 bits.
• floats are not necessarily IEEE-formatted or conformant.
• integer types are not necessarily two's complement, and integer arithmetic overflow causes undefined behaviour (modern hardware won't crash, but some compiler optimizations will result in behavior different from wraparound even though that's what the hardware does. For example if (x+1 < x) may be optimized as always false when x has signed type: see -fstrict-overflow option in GCC).
• "/", "." and ".." in a #include have no defined meaning and can be treated differently by different compilers (this does actually vary, and if it goes wrong it will ruin your day).

Really serious ones that can be surprising even on the platform you developed on, because behaviour is only partially undefined / unspecified:

• POSIX threading and the ANSI memory model. Concurrent access to memory is not as well defined as novices think. volatile doesn't do what novices think. Order of memory accesses is not as well defined as novices think. Accesses can be moved across memory barriers in certain directions. Memory cache coherency is not required.

• Profiling code is not as easy as you think. If your test loop has no effect, the compiler can remove part or all of it. inline has no defined effect.

And, as I think Nils mentioned in passing:

• VIOLATING THE STRICT ALIASING RULE.