The Principle of the Conservation of Software Quality postulates that for every best practice there is an equal and opposite worst practice which will be easier to implement. We're here today to talk about one of those balancing factors: declaration of externs within the C code.
Assume for a moment that foo() is defined somewhere within the codebase and, for reasons unclear, there is no header file declaring foo(). Perhaps foo() was not deemed important enough, or had been static when originally written and only later opened up to the rest of the module. However we got here if one has adopted the best practice of using -Wall -Werror when compiling, then calling foo() will require a declaration or result in a compilation error. One is then faced with several choices:
- Add foo() to an existing header file
- Make a new header file for foo() and any similar routines
- Declare foo() as an extern in the C file where it will be called.
Perhaps the Gentle Reader is unfamiliar with that last option. If so, I salute you: your unfamiliarity with it speaks well of you. To summarize: "extern" means the function is not provided within this compilation unit and will be supplied later when linking. It is normally used in header files, but is also valid within C code:
do {
extern int foo(int a, int b);
c = foo(a, b);
} while (c != 1);
The benefit of a function declaration in a header file is that it can be included in multiple places, in the file which implements the function and any file which wants to use the function. If the implementation of the function changes such that it no longer matches the declaration, an error will result. If the header changes such that the callers no longer match, an error will also result. Declaring an extern within a C file accomplishes none of these things, because the compiler does not get to see both the declaration and the implementation of foo at the same time.
Lets examine what will happen if a third argument is added to foo() but the caller blissfully relies on an existing extern declaration with two arguments. We'll use one of my favorite techniques, disassembling a MIPS binary to see how it works. We'll use a ridiculously simple example for clarity:
int foo(int a, int b, int c)
{
return (a + b + c);
}
| <foo>: | |
| addu v0,a0,a1 | tmp = a + b |
| addu v0,v0,a2 | tmp = tmp + c |
| jr ra | return to caller |
foo() expects arguments in registers a0, a1, and a2, and sums them together. Now lets look at the code generated by an extern declaration with only two arguments:
extern int foo(int a, int b); /* Worst Practice */
int main()
{
return foo(1, 2);
}
| <main>: | |
| li a0,1 | load 1 into the first arg register |
| li a1,2 | load 2 into the second arg register |
| lw t9,0(gp) | load address of foo() |
| jalr t9 | jump to foo() |
Not surprisingly, only registers a0 and a1 are loaded with values. The important point to note is that register a2 is not touched at all. One might have intuitively assumed that the third argument would be zero, but this is not the case. The third argument will be whatever garbage happens to be in register a2.
The third argument could be most anything, and might vary depending on the call chain or the data being processed. We end up with a sporadic and difficult to diagnose bug, hidden in a way that the compiler cannot help, and all because we didn't want to bother with a header file. This happened at a previous employer of mine, where a particular process would reliably crash at just one customer site because their particular environment ended up with a non-NULL value in the argument register. It was, of course, a crucial customer.
The moral of this article is that header files are your friend.
In Other News
Our family became larger in January, and the resulting lack of free time means postings will be less frequent. Previously I'd aimed for two postings per month, but now I think I'll be lucky to manage just one. I wrote several articles in advance, thinking that would be sufficient, but alas it was not enough. The Gentle Reader might have noticed one of those prepared postings appear twice. I accidentally marked the Blogroll article for 1/2008, and blogger.com happily sent it out immediately with a publication date one year prior. It also went out with the corrected date. I seem unable to expunge the mistaken early posting, that article still shows up twice in Google Reader. Oh well.