This adds -Wbitfield-enum-conversion, which warns on implicit
conversions that happen on bitfield assignment that change the value of
some enumerators.
Values of enum type typically take on a very small range of values, so
they are frequently stored in bitfields. Unfortunately, there is no
convenient way to calculate the minimum number of bits necessary to
store all possible values at compile time, so users usually hard code a
bitwidth that works today and widen it as necessary to pass basic
testing and validation. This is very error-prone, and leads to stale
widths as enums grow. This warning aims to catch such bugs.
This would have found two real bugs in clang and two instances of
questionable code. See r297680 and r297654 for the full description of
the issues.
This warning is currently disabled by default while we investigate its
usefulness outside of LLVM.
The major cause of false positives with this warning is this kind of
enum:
enum E { W, X, Y, Z, SENTINEL_LAST };
The last enumerator is an invalid value used to validate inputs or size
an array. Depending on the prevalance of this style of enum across a
codebase, this warning may be more or less feasible to deploy. It also
has trouble on sentinel values such as ~0U.