Subj : Improving GCC Buffer Overflow Detection for C Flexible Array Members (
To   : All
From : LWN.net
Date : Sun Nov 23 2025 16:15:09

Improving GCC Buffer Overflow Detection for C Flexible Array Members (Oracle)

Date:
Sun, 23 Nov 2025 16:08:32 +0000

Description:
The Oracle blog has a
lengthy article on enhancements to GCC to help detect overflows of
flexible array members (FAMs) in C programs. We describe here two new GNU 
extensions which specify size
	information for FAMs. These are a new attribute,
	" counted_by " and a new builtin function,
	" __builtin_counted_by_ref ". Both extensions can be used in
	GNU C applications to specify size information for FAMs, improving
	the buffer overflow detection for FAMs in general. This work has been 
covered on LWN as well.

======================================================================
Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1047547/


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