reasons for rewriting regular memory

[Oliver Fromme]

perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
 > Matthias Andree <matthias.andree at gmx.de> wrote:
 > > > I agree, but I can think of another valid exception. System with
 > > > Hamming correction on the memory, gets a single bit (correctable)
 > > > error. Need to rewrite the memory contents to reset all the parity
 > > > bits!
 > > That's a matter of the EDAC stuff, not the business of applications.
 > 
 > True, but it may explain why clang does not flag "*x = *x;" when it
 > does flag "x = x;".  A compiler cannot know the context in which the
 > compiled code will be used.

No -- If a program requires that an access to a variable
must not be optimized away by the compiler (because it is
a hardware register or something similar), then it must
declare the variable as "volatile".

But there is a simple reason that "x = x;" is flagged while
"*x = *x;" is not.  It is trivial to detect that the former
does not have any effect.  No operators are involved
(except for the assignment itself), so the compiler just
has to compare the _names_.  But in the latter case, it is
not trivial at all, because the compiler has to compare the
_values_ of the expressions and detect any side effects,
and it has to take a lot of things into account.  For
example, x could be part of the struct to which x points,
so the assignment could change the contents of the struct.
Detecting these cases would involve a rather deep and
extensive analysis of the code.  Obviously clang isn't
going that far (although, maybe a higher optimization level
could change that).

 > BTW I agree that an understanding is needed of _why_ the code in
 > question was included.

I think someone else already explained that in this thread.
The GIT reposity reveals that the author removed a variable
that was not used anymore, and replaced all occurences of
it, probably with automated search&replace, which lead to
the line in question, which is now superfluous.  It should
just be removed.

Best regards
   Oliver

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