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On many common platforms, this use of pointer punning can create problems if different pointers are aligned in machine-specific ways. 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 ...
C supports the use of pointers, a type of reference that records the address or location of an object or function in memory. Pointers can be dereferenced to access data stored at the address pointed to, or to invoke a pointed-to function. Pointers can be manipulated using assignment or pointer arithmetic. The run-time representation of a ...
For example, adding an integer number to a pointer produces another pointer that points to an address that is higher by that number times the size of the type. This allows us to easily compute the address of elements of an array of a given type, as was shown in the C arrays example above.
Containers which allocate memory from the heap using pointers may be swapped in a single operation, by swapping the pointers alone. This is usually found in programming languages supporting pointers, like C or C++. The Standard Template Library overloads its built-in swap function to exchange the contents of containers efficiently this way. [1]
Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function. Restrict the scope of data to the smallest possible. Check the return value of all non-void functions, or cast to void to indicate the return value is useless. Use the preprocessor sparingly. Limit pointer use to a single dereference, and do not use function pointers.
One such method is the use of weak references, while another involves using a mark-sweep algorithm that gets called infrequently to clean up. In a concurrent setting, all updates of the reference counts and all pointer modifications must be atomic operations, which incurs an additional cost. There are three reasons for the atomicity requirements.
In computer programming, an indirection (also called a reference) is a way of referring to something using a name, reference, or container instead of the value itself. The most common form of indirection is the act of manipulating a value through its memory address. For example, accessing a variable through the use of a pointer.
A snippet of C code which prints "Hello, World!". The syntax of the C programming language is the set of rules governing writing of software in C. It is designed to allow for programs that are extremely terse, have a close relationship with the resulting object code, and yet provide relatively high-level data abstraction.