Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In computer science, a tagged pointer is a pointer (concretely a memory address) with additional data associated with it, such as an indirection bit or reference count.This additional data is often "folded" into the pointer, meaning stored inline in the data representing the address, taking advantage of certain properties of memory addressing.
Smart pointers can facilitate intentional programming by expressing, in the type, how the memory of the referent of the pointer will be managed. For example, if a C++ function returns a pointer, there is no way to know whether the caller should delete the memory of the referent when the caller is finished with the information.
A dangling pointer is a pointer that does not point to a valid object and consequently may make a program crash or behave oddly. In the Pascal or C programming languages, pointers that are not specifically initialized may point to unpredictable addresses in memory. The following example code shows a dangling pointer:
In the C++ programming language, auto_ptr is an obsolete smart pointer class template that was available in previous versions of the C++ standard library (declared in the <memory> header file), which provides some basic RAII features for C++ raw pointers. It has been replaced by the unique_ptr class.
In assembly, C, C++, Pascal, Modula2 and other languages, a callback function is stored internally as a function pointer. Using the same storage allows different languages to directly share callbacks without a design-time or runtime interoperability layer. For example, the Windows API is accessible via multiple languages, compilers and assemblers.
If an object reliably has a pointer at a certain location, the reference count can be stored in the unused bits of the pointer. For example, each object in Objective-C has a pointer to its class at the beginning of its memory; on the ARM64 architecture using iOS 7, 19 unused bits of this class pointer are used to store the object's reference count.
In MC++, there were two different types of pointers: __nogc pointers were normal C++ pointers, while __gc pointers worked on .NET reference types. In C++/CLI, however, the only type of pointer is the normal C++ pointer, while the .NET reference types are accessed through a "handle", with the new syntax ClassName ^ (instead of ClassName *). This ...
In computer science, pointer swizzling is the conversion of references based on name or position into direct pointer references (memory addresses). It is typically performed during deserialization or loading of a relocatable object from a disk file, such as an executable file or pointer-based data structure .