What is the meaning of coverity warning : RW.ROUTINE_NOT_EMITTED?

Question

I am facing below coverity warning:

  Type: Parse recovery warning (RW.ROUTINE_NOT_EMITTED)
  Classification: Unclassified
  Severity: Unspecified
  Action: Undecided
  Owner: Unassigned
  Defect only exists locally.

Not sure what this means ??

Answer 1

The warning RW.ROUTINE_NOT_EMITTED is basically a parser warning which is generated when some piece of code is not analyzed due to previous errors.

But the real glitch I think is here that actual error you should fix is generated later in the sequence.

So I would suggest fix other below Coverity and this should be resolved.

In my case I forgot to include a header file for system structure. So due to this error parser could not parse something which generated the : RW.ROUTINE_NOT_EMITTED warning.

Answer 2

RW.ROUTINE_NOT_EMITTED means that the Coverity parser failed to understand some of the code running by it, but instead of discarding the entire file it recovered from the error and discarded the routine containing the error (since it's impossible to know whether the semantics were still valid or not).

This usually occurs when the dialect accepted by your compiler differs from the dialect accepted by the Coverity compiler, whether due to yours being further ahead of the curve on new language standards, by your compiler implementing its own extension to the language standard, or simply a bug in the Coverity compiler itself.

The best thing to do here would be to send a reproducer to Coverity support so that R&D can fix the issue in a future release. Otherwise, these are fairly safe to ignore - you won't get analysis defects reported for the function that was discarded, and inter-procedural analysis may miss some defects as well, but the odds of this are fairly low.