GCC 7, -Wimplicit-fallthrough warnings, and portable way to clear them?

Solution 1:

GCC expects the marker comment on its own line, like this:

  m_state = BODY;
  // fall through
case BODY:

The marker also has to come right before the case label; there cannot be an intervening closing brace }.

fall through is among the markers recognized by GCC. It's not just FALLTHRU. For a full list, see the documentation of the -Wimplicit-fallthrough option. Also see this posting on the Red Hat Developer blog.

C++17 adds a [[fallthrough]] attribute that can be used to suppress such warnings. Note the trailing semicolon:

  m_state = BODY;
  [[fallthrough]];
case BODY:

Clang supports -Wimplicit-fallthrough warnings, but does not enable them as part of -Wall or -Wextra. Clang does not recognize comment markers, so the attribute-based suppression has to be used for it (which currently means the non-standard __attribute__((fallthrough)) construct for the C front end).

Note that suppressing the warning with marker comments only works if the compiler actually sees the comment. If the preprocessor runs separately, it needs to be instructed to preserve comments, as with the -C option of GCC. For example, to avoid spurious warnings with ccache, you need to specify the -C flag when compiling, or, with recent versions of ccache, use the keep_comments_cpp option.

Solution 2:

C++17 [[fallthrough]]

Example:

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    switch (argc) {
        case 0:
            argc = 1;
            [[fallthrough]];
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    };
}

Compile with:

g++ -std=c++17 -Wimplicit-fallthrough main.cpp

If you remove the [[fallthrough]];, GCC warns:

main.cpp: In function ‘int main()’:
main.cpp:5:15: warning: this statement may fall through [-Wimplicit-fallthrough=]
             argc = 1;
             ~~^~~
main.cpp:6:9: note: here
         case 1:
         ^~~~

Also note from the example that the warning only happens if you fall beacross two cases: the last case statement (case 1 here) generates no warnings even though it has no break.

The following constructs don't generate the warning either:

#include <cstdlib>

[[noreturn]] void my_noreturn_func() {
    exit(1);
}

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
    // Erm, an actual break
    switch (argc) {
        case 0:
            argc = 1;
            break;
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    }

    // Return also works.
    switch (argc) {
        case 0:
            argc = 1;
            return 0;
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    }

    // noreturn functions are also work.
    // https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10538291/what-is-the-point-of-noreturn/47444782#47444782
    switch (argc) {
        case 0:
            argc = 1;
            my_noreturn_func();
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    }

    // Empty case synonyms are fine.
    switch (argc) {
        case 0:
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    }

    // Magic comment mentioned at:
    // https://stackoverflow.com/a/45137452/895245
    switch (argc) {
        case 0:
            argc = 1;
            // fall through
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    }

    switch (argc) {
        // GCC extension for pre C++17.
        case 0:
            argc = 1;
            __attribute__ ((fallthrough));
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    }

    switch (argc) {
        // GCC examines all braches.
        case 0:
            if (argv[0][0] == 'm') {
                [[fallthrough]];
            } else {
                return 0;
            }
        case 1:
            argc = 2;
    }
}

We can see from the last one that GCC examines all possible branches, and warns if any of them don't have [[fallthrough]]; or break or return.

You might also want to check for feature availability with macros as in this GEM5 inspired snippet:

#if defined __has_cpp_attribute
    #if __has_cpp_attribute(fallthrough)
        #define MY_FALLTHROUGH [[fallthrough]]
    #else
        #define MY_FALLTHROUGH
    #endif
#else
    #define MY_FALLTHROUGH
#endif

See also: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/fallthrough

Tested on GCC 7.4.0, Ubuntu 18.04.

See also

C version of this question: How to do an explicit fall-through in C