On Saturday 24 February 2018 01:32 AM, Martin Sebor wrote:
> Casting the address of a function that takes one or more arguments
> to one that takes fewer is unsafe because when the pointer is used
> to call the function the extra arguments have indeterminate values.
> (This is also why void(*)(void) as a wildcard was a poor choice:
> because it's only safe when it's an exact match.)
>
> Casting in the opposite direction (fewer arguments to more) can
> also lead to bugs under ABIs where the callee is responsible for
> restoring the frame pointer.

I completely agree about the safety aspect of it, but my argument is
about user experience, not safety.  We are after all talking about
explicit casts, i.e. cast decisions that users have consciously made.

> The intent behind the warning is to help find instances of these
> conversions that are unsafe and to drive improvements to code and
> get it to adopt a single common wildcard.  The current choice
> isn't ideal but expanding it even further would compromise
> the goal of the warning even more.

While varargs may solve a lot of these problems, the best viable
solution or cases where such casts are necessary seems to be to switch
off the warning, which kinda defeats the goal anyway.  IMO we're better
off making the warnings as less intrusive as possible to begin with and
then gradually make them more aggressive.

Siddhesh

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