GCC fails to spot uninitialized variable

From: Petko Manolov
Date: Fri Jul 15 2022 - 16:09:24 EST


Guys,

Today i was bitten by a stupid bug that i introduced myself while writing some
v4l2 code. Looking at it a bit more carefully i was surprised that GCC didn't
catch this one, as it was something that should definitely emit a warning.

When included into the driver, this particular code:

int blah(int a, int *b)
{
int ret;

switch (a) {
case 0:
ret = a;
break;
case 1:
ret = *b;
break;
case 2:
*b = a;
break;
default:
ret = 0;
}

return ret;
}

somehow managed to defeat GCC checks. Compiling it as a standalone .c file
with:

gcc -Wall -O2 -c t.c

gives me nice:

t.c:19:16: warning: 'ret' may be used uninitialized in this function [-Wmaybe-uninitialized]
19 | return ret;
| ^~~

Any idea what might have gone wrong?


cheers,
Petko