dereferencing pointer to incomplete type

Question

I've seen a lot of questions on this but I'm going to ask the question differently without specific code. Is there a way of EASILY determining what is causing the type to be incomplete? In my case I'm using someone elses code and I'm completely sure I don't have the headers right, but (since computers do this stuff much faster and better than human eyeballs) is there a way to get the compiler to say, "hey you think you have type X at line 34 but that's actually missing." The error itself only shows up when you assign, which isn't very helpful.

Answer 1

I don't exactly understand what's the problem. Incomplete type is not the type that's "missing". Incompete type is a type that is declared but not defined (in case of struct types). To find the non-defining declaration is easy. As for the finding the missing definition... the compiler won't help you here, since that is what caused the error in the first place.

A major reason for incomplete type errors in C are typos in type names, which prevent the compiler from matching one name to the other (like in matching the declaration to the definition). But again, the compiler cannot help you here. Compiler don't make guesses about typos.

Answer 2

What do you mean, the error only shows up when you assign? For example on GCC, with no assignment in sight:

int main() {
    struct blah *b = 0;
    *b; // this is line 6
}

incompletetype.c:6: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type.

The error is at line 6, that's where I used an incomplete type as if it were a complete type. I was fine up until then.

The mistake is that you should have included whatever header defines the type. But the compiler can't possibly guess what line that should have been included at: any line outside of a function would be fine, pretty much. Neither is it going to go trawling through every text file on your system, looking for a header that defines it, and suggest you should include that.

Alternatively (good point, potatoswatter), the error is at the line where b was defined, when you meant to specify some type which actually exists, but actually specified blah. Finding the definition of the variable b shouldn't be too difficult in most cases. IDEs can usually do it for you, compiler warnings maybe can't be bothered. It's some pretty heinous code, though, if you can't find the definitions of the things you're using.

Answer 3

I saw a question the other day where someone inadvertently used an incomplete type by specifying something like struct a { int q; }; struct A *x; x->q = 3;. The compiler knew that struct A was a struct, despite A being totally undefined, by virtue of the struct keyword.

That was in C++, where such usage of struct is atypical (and, it turns out, can lead to foot-shooting). In C if you do

typedef struct a {
    ...
} a;

then you can use a as the typename and omit the struct later. This will lead the compiler to give you an undefined identifier error later, rather than incomplete type, if you mistype the name or forget a header.