Tcl Source Code

As i read this, the intention is to issue an error, when someone passes in a value larger than "int" as result pointer in

   Tcl_GetBooleanFromObj(interp, objv[0], boolPtr);

since there is later a cast 

   Tcl_GetBooleanFromObj(interp, objPtr, (int *)(boolPtr))

For the code

   {
       size_t large = 0;
       result = Tcl_GetBooleanFromObj(interp, objPtr, &large);
   }

the error message in this case will be

   error: '_bool_Var' declared as an array with a negative size

as also the comment documents.

This is not great for the following reasons:
1) strange error message
2) generated only on GNU compatible compilers
3) handles just a particular case (object for the result is too large, why not covering too small?)
4) raises a warning also in cases, where everything is fine
   (when the paranoia flags are turned on, probably many developers will do this, when moving to tcl9)

Why not using

   static_assert( constant-expression, string-literal )

when available. It is part of
- C11
- MS: VS 2015
- GCC since gcc-4.6

With some mental contortion, one can also sneak it into expressions, 
as the following snippet shows.

   {
       size_t large = 0;
       result = Tcl_GetBooleanFromObj(interp, objPtr, &large)
               + (int)(sizeof(struct {static_assert(sizeof(large) <= sizeof(int),"all is lost");int dummy;})*0) ;
   }

This would address (1) and (4) and improves the situation on (2) as well.