RE: [ft-devel] compiler warnings produced by the RVCT ARM compiler

[Graham Asher]

Werner,

I am sorry but I shan't be able to work on a ready-to-run ARM compilation.
The trouble is, I am committed to working six days a week at the moment, and
I can't face doing any more.

On the subject of the ctype.h functions, there is nevertheless still a good
case for removing the dependency on them. They are used in parsers for
certain pieces of textual syntax in Type 1, CID and other files; these
formats are fixed, while the ctype.h functions are locale-dependent.
Potentially a perverse implementation of ctype.h could, for a certain locale
and certain font files, change the behaviour of FreeType. This is a small
but real risk.

There is really no good reason for FreeType to use these functions, when the
only required tasks are to identify uppercase and lowercase ASCII characters
and decimal and hexadecimal digits.

Is there a good argument for using the ctype.h functions that outweighs this
consideration? In general, I think the presumption ought to be on the side
of not using standard library functions unless their behaviour is not
locale-dependent or dependent on any other factors outside FreeType, and
either (i) they are trivial and are generally implemented correctly - like,
for example, strlen; or (ii) they provide a standard wrapper to platform
facilities - like, for example, fopen, fread, etc.

Best regards,

Graham


-----Original Message-----
From: Werner LEMBERG [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: 15 May 2007 07:49
To: address@hidden
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [ft-devel] compiler warnings produced by the RVCT ARM compiler


> compiling FreeType 2.3.4 using an ARM compiler (part of the RealView
> Compiler Tools suite: see
> http://www.arm.com/pdfs/DUI0205G_rvct_compiler_and_libraries_guide.pdf)
> I found some warnings and errors about the following things.

Thanks, applied to the CVS.

> I enclose patched versions of all the files.

A ready-to-run ARM compilation can probably be set up in `builds/arm'.
Would you like to work on this?

> Finally, in many environments, using the ctype.h functions isalpha,
> isdigit, etc., will cause writable global variables to be used.
> [...]

This is something I won't change since it is really platform
dependent.  It should be added to `builds/arm'.


    Werner