Some __nonstring__ Turbulence

Fedora stupidly uses beta compiler in new release, Torvalds blindly upgrades, makes breaking, unreviewed changes in kernel, then flames the maintainer who was working on cleanly updating the kernel for the not-yet-released compiler?<p>I admire Kees Cook&#x27;s patience.

Torvalds is known for being flamey towards kernel maintainers, but most of the time that is for good reason. Here however, he should just admit he made a mistake instead of doubling down. Admitting your own mistakes is a mark of a great maintainer as well.

From the comments:<p>&gt; C &quot;strings&quot; work the way they do because C is a low level language, where you want to be able to do low-level things when necessary. It&#x27;s a feature, not a deficiency.<p>Are NUL-terminated strings really considered preferable, even for low-level work? I always just considered them an unfortunate design choice C was stuck with.<p>Many O(1) operations&#x2F;checks become O(n) because you have to linearly traverse the entire string (or keep a second pointer) to know where it ends&#x2F;how long it is; you can&#x27;t take a substring within another string without reallocating and copying that part over with a new NUL appended at the end; you can&#x27;t store data that may contain a NUL (which text <i>shouldn&#x27;t</i>, in theory, but then you need a separate approach for binary data); and plenty of security issues arise from missing or extra NULs.

Linus was a hypocritical asshole here, but more to the point, why are they using strings for this anyway? No byte arrays &#x2F; literals in their C dialect?

That the annotation applies to variables and not types is surely an oversight or mistake right? Seems like it could have been easier to initially implement that way but it just doesn’t seem to fit with how C type system works. (Yes it will make declarations uglier to do it on types but that ship has sailed long ago; see cdecl.org)

It’s still shocking to me that there’s no official kernel CI.

This is definitely unexpected for me - I&#x27;d have thought something like an RC for a kernel would have to be &#x27;approved&#x27; for release only after passing all tests, which should include building with all official compilers (and all official architectures, etc).<p>Unless either the older GCC or the beta GCC isn&#x27;t &quot;official&quot;? In which case that&#x27;s not necessarily expected to be picked up in an RC?

Err... we teach C neophytes that you should never write values to variables that are larger than what the variables can hold. Don&#x27;t write an int to a short, don&#x27;t write a short to a char, and don&#x27;t initialize five bytes to an array storing four bytes. Am I missing something here? char foo[4] = &quot;ABCD&quot; is always incorrect, no ifs and buts. If you want &quot;readable&quot; bytes, use character literals. You should never discount the null terminator.