putting the extern keyword in front of __constant__ memory doesn't throw an error

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Hi,

In attempting to have on global constant parameters structure for a project, I declared an extern constant structure. As I later learned, this is forbidden according to the CUDA C Programming Guide, but it doesn’t throw a compiler error, and instead will compiling, letting you read a structure now filled with zeros, which is probably some bad pointer access. It seems like this should probably throw an error.

I’m running nvcc release 4.2, V0.2.1221 on ubuntu 11.04.

Thanks!