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ccalloccoverity

Why does coverity complain when using calloc with unsigned int

I have the following:

static unsigned int *tick = NULL;
...
 if (tick == NULL)
     tick = calloc(MAX_PORT,sizeof(unsigned int));
...

which functionally works as expected but coverity complains with: Parse warning (PW.INCOMPATIBLE_ASSIGNMENT_OPERANDS) 1. incompatible_assignment_operands: a value of type "int" cannot be assigned to an entity of type "unsigned int *" and I don't entirely understand why

Solution

  • The error message suggests that Coverity thinks that calloc returns an int, which can happen if you haven't included stdlib.h (for calloc) in the older C. But this is not allowed in modern C (i.e., no implicit declarations allowed in C99 and above).