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In computer programming, lazy initialization is the tactic of delaying the creation of an object, the calculation of a value, or some other expensive process until the first time it is needed.
This might look like a smart way to assign the return value of malloc to ptr and check if it is NULL in one step, but the malloc call and the assignment to ptr is a side effect of evaluating the expression that forms the assert condition.
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.
The language does not provide any explicit pointer manipulation operators. It is still possible for code to attempt to dereference a null reference (null pointer), however, which results in a run-time exception being thrown. The space occupied by unreferenced memory objects is recovered automatically by garbage collection at run-time. [20]
The canonical heap overflow technique overwrites dynamic memory allocation linkage (such as malloc metadata) and uses the resulting pointer exchange to overwrite a program function pointer. For example, on older versions of Linux , two buffers allocated next to each other on the heap could result in the first buffer overwriting the second ...
C uses the malloc function; C++ and Java use the new operator; and many other languages (such as Python) allocate all objects from the free store. Determining when an object ought to be created ( object creation ) is generally trivial and unproblematic, though techniques such as object pools mean an object may be created before immediate use.
In computing, a null pointer or null reference is a value saved for indicating that the pointer or reference does not refer to a valid object. Programs routinely use null pointers to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform some action; this use of null pointers can be compared to nullable types ...
Nullable types are a feature of some programming languages which allow a value to be set to the special value NULL instead of the usual possible values of the data type.In statically typed languages, a nullable type is an option type, [citation needed] while in dynamically typed languages (where values have types, but variables do not), equivalent behavior is provided by having a single null ...