rust-lang/rust — pull request #20373 by huonw (2014-12-31 16:18:18+00:00)
Title: Add a lint `unconditional_self_calls` to detect unconditional recursion.

E.g. `fn foo() { foo() }`, or, more subtlely

impl Foo for Box {
fn bar(&self) {
self.bar();
}
}

The compiler will warn and point out the points where recursion occurs,
if it determines that the function cannot return without calling itself.

Closes #17899.

---

This is highly non-perfect, in particular, my wording above is quite precise, and I have some unresolved questions: This currently will warn about

```rust
fn foo() {
if bar { loop {} }

foo()
}
```

even though `foo` may never be called (i.e. our apparent "unconditional" recursion is actually conditional). I don't know if we should handle this case, and ones like it with `panic!()` instead of `loop` (or anything else that "returns" `!`).

However, strictly speaking, it seems to me that changing the above to not warn will require changing

```rust
fn foo() {
while bar {}
foo()
}
```

to also not warn since it could be that the `while` is an infinite loop and doesn't ever hit the `foo`.

I'm inclined to think we let these cases warn since true edge cases like the first one seem rare, and if they do occur they seem like they would usually be typos in the function call. (I could imagine someone accidentally having code like `fn foo() { assert!(bar()); foo() /* meant to be boo() */ }` which won't warn if the `loop` case is "fixed".)

(Part of the reason this is unresolved is wanting feedback, part of the reason is I couldn't devise a strategy that worked in all cases.)

---

The name `unconditional_self_calls` is kinda clunky; and this reconstructs the CFG for each function that is linted which may or may not be very expensive, I don't know.