Re: Clang 3.3 Analyzer Results

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> ...
>
> One thought for the Clang people is that most of the reports such as "null
> pointer dereference" presumably mean "I think I see an execution path
> whereby we could get here with a null pointer". If so, it'd be awfully
> helpful if the complaint included some description of what that path is.
> I think Coverity does that, or at least I've seen output from some tool
> that does it.
Clang can be trained with asserts.

If you are certain that a parameter cannot be NULL, then pass the
knowledge onto Clang: assert(param != NULL). Clang will stop analyzing
that path for NULL-ness.

Or, you could check it for NULL and fail the function if the param is
NULL. If its a spurious test, then the optimizer will remove it.

Jeff