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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.
C++ fully supports C pointers and C typecasting. It also supports a new group of typecasting operators to help catch some unintended dangerous casts at compile-time. Since C++11, the C++ standard library also provides smart pointers (unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr) which can be used in some situations as a safer alternative to primitive C ...
C compilers do not name mangle symbols in the way that C++ compilers do. [20] Depending on the compiler and architecture, it also may be the case that calling conventions differ between the two languages. For these reasons, for C++ code to call a C function foo(), the C++ code must prototype foo() with extern "C".
In the C programming language, restrict is a keyword, introduced by the C99 standard, [1] that can be used in pointer declarations. By adding this type qualifier, a programmer hints to the compiler that for the lifetime of the pointer, no other pointer will be used to access the object to which it points. This allows the compiler to make ...
All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code. Avoid heap memory allocation. Restrict functions to a single printed page. 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.
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.