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Since standard C++ subsumes the C standard library, the C dynamic memory allocation routines malloc, calloc, realloc and free are also available to C++ programmers. The use of these routines is discouraged for most uses, since they do not perform object initialization and destruction.
The void pointer, or void*, is supported in ANSI C and C++ as a generic pointer type. A pointer to void can store the address of any object (not function), [a] and, in C, is implicitly converted to any other object pointer type on assignment, but it must be explicitly cast if dereferenced.
For this purpose, the C++11 standard library defines the smart pointer classes std::unique_ptr for single-owned objects and std::shared_ptr for objects with shared ownership. Similar classes are also available through std::auto_ptr in C++98, and boost::shared_ptr in the Boost libraries. Also, messages can be sent to network resources using RAII.
The most vexing parse is a counterintuitive form of syntactic ambiguity resolution in the C++ programming language. In certain situations, the C++ grammar cannot distinguish between the creation of an object parameter and specification of a function's type. In those situations, the compiler is required to interpret the line as a function type ...
When an object is created, a pointer to this table, called the virtual table pointer, vpointer or VPTR, is added as a hidden member of this object. As such, the compiler must also generate "hidden" code in the constructors of each class to initialize a new object's virtual table pointer to the address of its class's virtual method table.
Wild pointers, also called uninitialized pointers, arise when a pointer is used prior to initialization to some known state, which is possible in some programming languages. They show the same erratic behavior as dangling pointers, though they are less likely to stay undetected because many compilers will raise a warning at compile time if ...
(However, default initialization to 0 is a right practice for pointers and arrays of pointers, since it makes them invalid before they are actually initialized to their correct value.) In C, variables with static storage duration that are not initialized explicitly are initialized to zero (or null, for pointers).
In the C programming language, struct is the keyword used to define a composite, a.k.a. record, data type – a named set of values that occupy a block of memory. It allows for the different values to be accessed via a single identifier, often a pointer.