Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH 0/5] Scoped locks using attribute((cleanup))

[Emilio G. Cota]

On Fri, Dec 08, 2017 at 11:55:48 +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> So I'm a bit underwhelmed by this experiment.  Other opinions?

I am on the same boat. Most use cases in this patchset are arguably
adding more complexity because they substitute already very simple
code (e.g. "lock; do_something; unlock"), as others have pointed out
as well.

I usually deal with tricky cases (i.e. functions with many return
paths) with an inline "__locked" function. In most cases this will
be clearer than using the macros. I concede though that the separate
inline is not always an option.

That said, two comments:

- We might be better off just exposing the cleanup attribute
  via some convenience macros. The systemd codebase does this,
  mostly for freeing memory or closing file descriptors. I suspect
  a large percentage of goto's in our codebase could be eliminated.

  This could be also used for locks, although we'd need a variant
  of mutex_lock that returned the mutex, so that in the cleanup
  function we could just check for NULL.

- Does the cleanup attribute work on all compilers used to build QEMU?
  (I'm thinking of Windows in particular.)

Thanks,

                Emilio