Unused GCC builtins
Florian Weimer
fw@deneb.enyo.de
Mon Jan 22 18:30:00 GMT 2018
* Manuel Rigger:
> Details: We downloaded all C projects from GitHub that had more than 80
> GitHub stars, which yielded almost 5,000 projects with a total of more
> than one billion lines of C code. We filtered GCC, forks of GCC, and
> other compilers as we did not want to incorporate internal usages of GCC
> builtins or test cases. We extracted all builtin names from the GCC
> docs, and also tried to find such names in the source code, which we
> considered as builtin usages.
You actually need to compile the sources with an instrumented compiler
to discover uses of built-ins. Not all references will have verbatim,
textual references in source code, but their names are constructed
using preprocessor macros. This happens for the majority of the
floating-point-related built-ins you listed, I think.
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