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Tombstones are a mechanism to detect dangling pointers and mitigate the problems they can cause in computer programs. Dangling pointers can appear in certain computer programming languages, e.g. C, C++ and assembly languages. A tombstone is a structure that acts as an intermediary between a pointer and its target, often heap-dynamic data in memory.
In computer science, pointer analysis, or points-to analysis, is a static code analysis technique that establishes which pointers, or heap references, can point to which variables, or storage locations. It is often a component of more complex analyses such as escape analysis. A closely related technique is shape analysis.
Another frequent source of dangling pointers is a jumbled combination of malloc() and free() library calls: a pointer becomes dangling when the block of memory it points to is freed. As with the previous example one way to avoid this is to make sure to reset the pointer to null after freeing its reference—as demonstrated below.
In C++ pointers to non-static members of a class can be defined. If a class C has a member T a then &C::a is a pointer to the member a of type T C::*. This member can be an object or a function. [16] They can be used on the right-hand side of operators .* and ->* to access the corresponding member.
In Objective-C, a trampoline is an object returned by a method that captures and reifies all messages sent to it and then "bounces" those messages on to another object, for example in higher order messaging. [6] In the GCC compiler, trampoline refers to a technique for implementing pointers to nested functions when -ftrampolines option is ...
The Power of 10 Rules were created in 2006 by Gerard J. Holzmann of the NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software. [1] The rules are intended to eliminate certain C coding practices that make code difficult to review or statically analyze.
At various times, Microsoft has said P-code is an abbreviation for either packed code [7] or pseudo code. [8] Microsoft P-code was used in Visual C++ and Visual Basic. Like other P-code implementations, Microsoft P-code enabled a more compact executable at the expense of slower execution.
Furthermore, pointers of different sizes can alias accesses to the same memory, causing problems that are unchecked by the compiler. Even when data size and pointer representation match, however, compilers can rely on the non-aliasing constraints to perform optimizations that would be unsafe in the presence of disallowed aliasing.