Is GCC mishandling a pointer to a va_list passed to a function?

Question

The question \'Pass va_list or pointer to va_list?\' has an answer which quotes the standard (ISO/IEC 9899:1999 - §7.15 \'Variable arguments , f

Answer 1

The problem is not specific to va_list. The following code results in a similar warning:

typedef char *test[1];

void x(test *a)
{
}

void y(test o)
{
    x(&o);
}

The problem stems from the way C handles function variables that are also arrays, probably due to the fact that arrays are passed as reference and not by value. The type of o is not the same as the type of a local variable of type test, in this case: char *** instead of char *(*)[1].

Returning to the original issue at hand, the easy way to work around it is to use a container struct:

struct va_list_wrapper {
    va_list v;
};

and there would be no typing problems passing a point to it.