C cheatsheetEdit

Here follow some notes from The World’s Worst C Programmer.

I’ve written lots of C or C-like (eg. Objective-C) code over the years, but I do it rarely enough nowadays (ie. writing this in 2022) that whenever I come back to it there are a bunch of things I have forgotten and have to look up again. So, here is a scratchpad for me to jot some notes down in the hope that I won’t forget, again, what all these details are.

Debugging segmentation faults

With clang/lldb on macOS

1. Build with -g (debug symbols) and -O0 (optimizations off).
2. Launch with lldb --file $executable.
3. Run with r.
4. See backtrace with bt.

With gdb on Arch Linux

You can also launch executables with gdb (ie. after yay -S gdb).

1. Launch with gdb executable.
2. Run with r (or r [arguments]).
3. See backtrace with bt.

You have the additional option of inspecting a core dump after the fact; example:

# unzstd /var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.nvim.1000.008a013d9f0d4e769d9dbcfdd9d9584a.13538.1656944479000000.std
# chmod 666 /var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.nvim.1000.008a013d9f0d4e769d9dbcfdd9d9584a.13538.1656944479000000
$ gdb nvim /var/lib/systemd/coredump/core.nvim.1000.008a013d9f0d4e769d9dbcfdd9d9584a.13538.1656944479000000
(gdb) bt

ie.

1. Undo zstandard compression on root-owned core dump file.
2. Change ownership so that normal user can read file.
3. Relaunch executable (this time, nvim) with gdb and the core dump file.
4. Print the backtrace.

NULL versus NUL

• NULL is a "NULL pointer" (((void *)0)), defined in <stddef.h>.
• NUL refers to the "NUL byte" ('\0'), used to terminate NUL-terminated strings.

Note that despite both being "zero" they have different sizes due to their use in different contexts; the NULL pointer will typically be a 64-bit or 32-bit value, while NUL will be an 8-bit char.

Viewing generated assembly

Given a source file, source.c, produce output source.s with:

gcc -S source.c

assert() and abort()

assert(expression) is a debugging and developmental aid that aborts the program unless expression is true. If -DNDEBUG is passed to the compiler, the entire construct is omitted. As such, for release builds, assert() calls can be considered to be "free".

abort() unconditionally terminates the program.

As a rule of thumb:

• Use assert() to detect logic bugs, things that "should never happen", during development. In a sense, assertions exist not just to detect invalid assumptions, but to communicate what those assumptions are.
• Use abort() for when things have gone catastrophically wrong, such that continuing isn’t a viable option.
• Neither of these is a substitute for handling routine error states (for example, failure to read or write a file can happen for any number of reasons, and the program should very likely make some attempt at graceful recovery when this happens).

printf format markers

From man 3 printf:

• %c: char.
• %d: int (printed as signed decimal).
  • %dl: long int (printed as unsigned decimal).
  • %dl: long long int (printed as unsigned decimal).
• %f: double.
• %o: int (printed as unsigned octal).
  • %oz: size_t (printed as unsigned octal).
• %p: void * (printed in hexadecimal).
• %s: NUL-terminated string.
• %u: unsigned (printed as unsigned decimal).
  • %ul: unsigned long (printed as unsigned decimal).
  • %ull: unsigned long long (printed as unsigned decimal).
  • %uz: size_t (printed as unsigned decimal).
• %x: unsigned (printed as unsigned hexadecimal).
  • %xl: unsigned long (printed as unsigned hexadecimal).
  • %xll: unsigned long long (printed as unsigned hexadecimal).
  • %xz: size_t (printed as unsigned hexadecimal).
• %%: literal %.

size_t

On Darwin, this is equivalent to unsigned long (which nowadays means uint64_t, as defined in <stdint.h>), but in general a good heuristic for remembering when to use this and what it is:

• Use it for things whose size is to be measured in bytes.
• Its size is big enough to represent whatever the "biggest object" could be on the host system.
• Technically, size_t is defined, in <stddef.h>, as the type of the result of the sizeof() operator.

sizeof

• sizeof("string literal") includes the trailing NULL byte; note this is different from strlen(), which returns the number of bytes before the NULL.
• sizeof(0xff) is equivalent to sizeof(int); Clang will warn that this is suspicious, so if you really mean it you can write sizeof(typeof(0xff)) instead.

ssize_t

Signed equivalent of size_t.

Biggest possible value is SSIZE_MAX, defined in <limits.h>.

static functions

A function declared with the static keyword is not visible outside of the translation unit in which it is defined.

static variables

A variable defined with static outside all functions is only visible inside its own translation unit. This is analogous to how static applies to functions.

A variable defined with static inside a function maintains its value across invocations.