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In C, two null pointers of any type are guaranteed to compare equal. [3] Prior to C23, the preprocessor macro NULL was provided, defined as an implementation-defined null pointer constant in <stdlib.h>, [4] which in C99 can be portably expressed as ((void *)0), the integer value 0 converted to the type void* (see pointer to void type). [5]
A null pointer has a value reserved for indicating that the pointer does not refer to a valid object. Null pointers are routinely used 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 and to the Nothing value in an option type.
Void safety (also known as null safety) is a guarantee within an object-oriented programming language that no object references will have null or void values. In object-oriented languages, access to objects is achieved through references (or, equivalently, pointers ).
A program can convert a pointer to any type of data (except a function pointer) to a pointer to void and back to the original type without losing information, which makes these pointers useful for polymorphic functions. The C language standard does not guarantee that the different pointer types have the same size or alignment.
In conditional contexts, null pointer values evaluate to false, while all other pointer values evaluate to true. Void pointers (void *) point to objects of unspecified type, and can therefore be used as "generic" data pointers. Since the size and type of the pointed-to object is not known, void pointers cannot be dereferenced, nor is pointer ...
It takes one parameter: the amount of memory to allocate in bytes. Upon successful allocation, malloc returns a generic (void) pointer value, pointing to the beginning of the allocated space. The pointer value returned is converted to an appropriate type implicitly by assignment. If the allocation could not be completed, malloc returns a null ...
The new operator returns a pointer of type based on operand, whereas malloc returns a void pointer. C++ code can use virtual functions and templates to achieve polymorphism without void pointers. Safer casting operators, such as dynamic cast that performs run-time type checking.
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.