13.15 Telling the Compiler that a Function is Defined

Byte-compiling a file often produces warnings about functions that the compiler doesn’t know about (see Compiler Errors). Sometimes this indicates a real problem, but usually the functions in question are defined in other files which would be loaded if that code is run. For example, byte-compiling simple.el used to warn:

simple.el:8727:1:Warning: the function ‘shell-mode’ is not known to be
    defined.

In fact, shell-mode is used only in a function that executes (require 'shell) before calling shell-mode, so shell-mode will be defined properly at run-time. When you know that such a warning does not indicate a real problem, it is good to suppress the warning. That makes new warnings which might mean real problems more visible. You do that with declare-function.

All you need to do is add a declare-function statement before the first use of the function in question:

(declare-function shell-mode "shell" ())

This says that shell-mode is defined in shell.el (the ‘.el’ can be omitted). The compiler takes for granted that that file really defines the function, and does not check.

The optional third argument specifies the argument list of shell-mode. In this case, it takes no arguments (nil is different from not specifying a value). In other cases, this might be something like (file &optional overwrite). You don’t have to specify the argument list, but if you do the byte compiler can check that the calls match the declaration.

macro declare-function function file \&optional arglist fileonly

Tell the byte compiler to assume that function is defined in the file file. The optional third argument arglist is either t, meaning the argument list is unspecified, or a list of formal parameters in the same style as defun. An omitted arglist defaults to t, not nil; this is atypical behavior for omitted arguments, and it means that to supply a fourth but not third argument one must specify t for the third-argument placeholder instead of the usual nil. The optional fourth argument fileonly non-nil means check only that file exists, not that it actually defines function.

To verify that these functions really are declared where declare-function says they are, use check-declare-file to check all declare-function calls in one source file, or use check-declare-directory check all the files in and under a certain directory.

These commands find the file that ought to contain a function’s definition using locate-library; if that finds no file, they expand the definition file name relative to the directory of the file that contains the declare-function call.

You can also say that a function is a primitive by specifying a file name ending in ‘.c’ or ‘.m’. This is useful only when you call a primitive that is defined only on certain systems. Most primitives are always defined, so they will never give you a warning.

Sometimes a file will optionally use functions from an external package. If you prefix the filename in the declare-function statement with ‘ext:’, then it will be checked if it is found, otherwise skipped without error.

There are some function definitions that ‘check-declare’ does not understand (e.g., defstruct and some other macros). In such cases, you can pass a non-nil fileonly argument to declare-function, meaning to only check that the file exists, not that it actually defines the function. Note that to do this without having to specify an argument list, you should set the arglist argument to t (because nil means an empty argument list, as opposed to an unspecified one).