[Zel2008]

Hi all,

I thought I'd share a little tidbit I just learned, just so no one else tears their hair out like me in the future.

I was writing a program, and I had a function that returned a string. I didn't realize that I'd forgotten the return statement, and unfortunately I wasn't compiling with -Wall, which would have shown me that. Anyway, I was getting a segfault and bad permissions error, like this:

==25217== Process terminating with default action of signal 11 (SIGSEGV)
==25217==  Bad permissions for mapped region at address 0x80F2B61
==25217==    at 0x40B5C1B: std::string::~string() (in /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.10)
==25217==    by 0x804ACD8: MyCode::run() (MyCode.cpp:219)
==25217==    by 0x804BD28: main (MyCode.cpp:243)

And whenever I looked in the code I wrote, the line numbers corresponded to the method signatures, but no particular line in the method I could debug from.

So what did I learn from this? ALWAYS, ALWAYS check to make sure you have appropriate return statements. If a lack of return statements was an error in g++, rather than a warning, I bet it would save people a lot of debugging headaches.

The takeaway message from this is, if you get segfaults that map back to method signatures, check the return statements first. It'll save you a lot of hassle.

Hope that helps someone!
Zel2008

[vividexstance]

That's why you should always compile with the highest level of warnings/errors, IMO.

[ishkabible]

Ya, I'm pretty paranoid about warnings. Turn on everything your IDE will allow or read up on your compiler's options and turn on warnings like those for missing return statements.

[vividexstance]

With gcc, there is actually a setting that makes all warnings errors.

[raspinudo]

gcc -Werror hello.c -o hello

[masoug]

Usually when I define my function, I'll first write out the return statement and then fill in the rest of the function definition:

int myfunc()
{
// code goes here...
return 0; // I write this line first, then go back and flesh out the rest of the function definition.
}

I don't know if anyone really does this, its just my thing.

-Masoug

[CodeBreather]

vividexstance, on 23 March 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:

With gcc, there is actually a setting that makes all warnings errors.

Heres a picture of in Code::Blocks goto project->build options in the top menu bar this is what you should see:



i have all but the pedantic errors ill see the warning and ill fix it from there but some may chose to get them as error, but to each their own.

[novacrazy]

CodeBreather, on 10 April 2012 - 12:48 PM, said:

vividexstance, on 23 March 2012 - 10:04 PM, said:

With gcc, there is actually a setting that makes all warnings errors.

Well, in response to the pic and setting every warning message... I have noticed GCC actually fails to compile some things with extra warnings enabled sometimes. Not even when it considers warnings errors, but really where a new error pops up that was never there before. Usually some weird thing deep in the standard or boost libraries that I've been unable to resolve unless I turn off that warning flag. Eh, so sometimes I have to go without warnings.