Re:Typing Practice for Programmers
by trentnelson on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @01:05AM
(#13528132)
Ah, yeah, const-correctness definitely gets way more tedious, but eh, just like the ugly as sin typedefs, I think it's a net win.
I've been contemplating doing a little project that scans all the SDK/DDK headers for SAL annotations in use and making a big cross-reference where you can, like, click on the #defines in <sal.h> and see all the places where there are real examples of it being used.
Some of the complex uses are really hard to grok just from MSDN documentation alone; I've found looking around at the WDK/DDK headers much more useful.
Unrelated question: why'd you leave Microsoft? Were you doing NT kernel development there? Is that what you've done in the past?
Back when I was in Windows, the system was so robust that if the static analyzer reported on your code, it was your code that had the problem, not the analyzer. It did bounds checking, nullability analysis, and tons of useful stuff. It's fantastic.
The thing about NT-style pointer typedefs is that they discourage const-correctness: it's enough of a pain to make a PFOO. You want a PCFOO too? That said, I'd be more than happy to live with poiner typedefs if I got SAL back.
BTW, I also used a hacked-up cc-mode that understood all the SAL annotations and fontified them using font-lock-keyword-face. It worked great.