Empty unions serve no purpose, and while we compile with gcc
which permits them, strict C99 forbids them. We happen to inject
a dummy 'void *data' member into the C unions that represent QAPI
unions and alternates, but we want to get rid of that member (it
pollutes the namespace for no good reason), which would leave us
with an empty union if the user didn't provide any branches. While
empty structs make sense in QAPI, empty unions don't add any
expressiveness to the QMP language. So prohibit them at parse
time. Update the documentation and testsuite to match.
Note that the documentation already mentioned that alternates
should have "two or more JSON data types"; so this also fixes
the code to enforce that. However, we have existing uses of a
union type with only one branch, so the 2-or-more strictness
is intentionally limited to alternates.
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <1455778109-6278-3-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
The documentation claims that alternates are useful for
allowing two or more types, although nothing enforces this.
Meanwhile, it is silent on whether empty unions are allowed.
In practice, the generated code will compile, in part because
we have a 'void *data' branch; but attempting to visit such a
type will cause an abort(). While there's no technical reason
that a degenerate union could not be made to work, it's harder
to justify the time spent in chasing known (the current
abort() during visit) and unknown corner cases, than it would
be to just outlaw them. A future patch will probably take the
approach of forbidding them; in the meantime, we can at least
add testsuite coverage to make it obvious where things stand.
In addition to adding tests to expose the problems, we also
need to adjust existing tests that are meant to test something
else, but which could fail for the wrong reason if we reject
degenerate alternates/unions.
Note that empty structs are explicitly supported (for example,
right now they are the only way to specify that one branch of a
flat union adds no additional members), and empty enums are
covered by the testsuite as working (even if they do not seem
to have much use).
Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <1443565276-4535-8-git-send-email-eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
