Question

A colleague of mine recently got bitten badly by writing out of bounds to a static array on the stack (he added an element to it without increasing the array size). Shouldn’t the compiler catch this kind of error? The following code compiles cleanly with gcc, even with the -Wall -Wextra options, and yet it is clearly erroneous:

int main(void) {   int a[10];   a[13] = 3;  // oops, overwrote the return address   return 0; } 

I’m positive that this is undefined behavior, although I can’t find an excerpt from the C99 standard saying so at the moment. But in the simplest case, where the size of an array is known as compile time and the indices are known at compile time, shouldn’t the compiler emit a warning at the very least?

Answer 1

GCC does warn about this. But you need to do two things:

1. Enable optimization. Without at least -O2, GCC is not doing enough analysis to know what a is, and that you ran off the edge.
2. Change your example so that a[] is actually used, otherwise GCC generates a no-op program and has completely discarded your assignment.

.

$ cat foo.c  int main(void) {   int a[10];   a[13] = 3;  // oops, overwrote the return address   return a[1]; } $ gcc -Wall -Wextra  -O2 -c foo.c  foo.c: In function ‘main’: foo.c:4: warning: array subscript is above array bounds 

BTW: If you returned a[13] in your test program, that wouldn’t work either, as GCC optimizes out the array again.