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spec: document that Alignof, Offsetof, and Sizeof do not evaluate their arguments #12946

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mdempsky opened this issue Oct 15, 2015 · 2 comments
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spec: document that Alignof, Offsetof, and Sizeof do not evaluate their arguments #12946

mdempsky opened this issue Oct 15, 2015 · 2 comments
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@griesemer
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Documentation Issues describing a change to documentation. NeedsInvestigation Someone must examine and confirm this is a valid issue and not a duplicate of an existing one.
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@mdempsky
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At least in cmd/compile, unsafe.Alignof, unsafe.Offsetof, and unsafe.Sizeof do not evaluate their arguments: http://play.golang.org/p/4QE3mVrFaS

Although unsurprising and consistent with C/C++, the Go spec doesn't mention this. It does say

Calls to Alignof, Offsetof, and Sizeof are compile-time constant expressions of type uintptr.

but I don't think that's necessarily mutually exclusive with evaluating the argument expression.
@ianlancetaylor ianlancetaylor added this to the Unplanned milestone Oct 15, 2015
@gopherbot
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CL https://golang.org/cl/16004 mentions this issue.

@gopherbot gopherbot added the Documentation Issues describing a change to documentation. label Mar 21, 2017
@griesemer griesemer mentioned this issue May 5, 2017
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@josharian josharian mentioned this issue May 5, 2017
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@tzneal
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tzneal commented Aug 11, 2018

I like the current behavior, as it allows the following to work which lets you get sizes of arbitrary types given their names:

unsafe.Sizeof(*(*uint8)(nil))

See https://play.golang.org/p/MeFfDzoGpxo, my reading of "compile-time constant expressions of" implied that is wouldn't evaluate the expression, leading me to the above construct. I'm using this in some generated code now.

@zpavlinovic zpavlinovic mentioned this issue May 4, 2022
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@griesemer griesemer modified the milestones: Unplanned, Go1.19, Backlog May 12, 2022
@seankhliao seankhliao added the NeedsInvestigation Someone must examine and confirm this is a valid issue and not a duplicate of an existing one. label Jul 13, 2024
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