Why VLAIS is bad

At the beginning of the month I was at FOSDEM interfacing and watching talks on behalf of HP's Advanced Technology Group.  Since my core passion is working on and debugging C code I went to several talks on Clang, Valgrind and other similar technologies.  Unfortunately there I several talks I couldn't get into due to the sheer popularity of them but I hope to catch up with video in the future.

One talk I went to was on getting the Linux kernel to compile in Clang.  It appears that there are many changes which are down to Clang being a minimum of C99 compliant and GCC supporting some non-standard language extensions.

The one language extension which stood out for me was called VLAIS which stands for Variable Length Arrays In Structs.  Now, VLAs (Variable Length Arrays) are nothing new in C they have been around a long time.  What we are talking about here are variable length arrays at any point in the struct.  For example:

void foo(int n) {

    struct {

        int x;

        char y[n];

        int z;
    } bar;
}

The char in this struct is what we are talking about here.  This kind of code is used in several places in the kernel, for the most part it is used in encryption algorithms.

How did it get added to GCC?

It came about around 2004 in what appears to be a conversion of a standard from ADA to C.  There is a mailing list post on it here.  It has since been used in the kernel and I can understand the argument that the kernel was never intended to be compiled with anything other than GCC.  But the side of me that likes openness and portability is not so keen.  I suspect the problems that currently plague the kernel for Clang also affect compilers such as Intel's ICC and other native CPU manufacturer's compilers.

So why is it bad?

Well, to start with there is the portability issue.  Any code that uses this will not compile in other compilers.  If you turn on the pedantic C99 flags in GCC it won't compile either (if you aren't doing this then you really should, it shakes out lots of bugs).  Once Linus Torvalds found out about the usage of it in the kernel he called it an abomination and asked for it to be dropped.

Next there is debugging.  I'm not even sure if debuggers understand this and if they do I can well imagine it being difficult to work with, especially if you need to track Z in the example above.

There is the possibility of alignment issues.  Some architectures work much better when the structs are byte aligned by a certain width.  This will be difficult to do with a VLAIS in the middle of the struct.

In general I just don't think it is clean code and if it were me I would be using pointers and allocated memory instead.

Of course this is all my opinion and I'm sure people have other views that I haven't thought of.  Please use the comments box to let me know what you think about VLAIS and its use in the kernel.  You can find out more in the Linux Plumbers Conference 2013 slides.