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In the C99 and C17 standards, section 6.5.6 paragraph 8 means that
adding 0 to a null pointer is undefined behavior. As of writing,
"clang -fsanitize=undefined" (Clang 15) diagnoses this. However,
I'm not aware of any compiler that would take advantage of this
when optimizing (Clang 15 included). It's good to avoid this anyway
since compilers might some day infer that pointer arithmetic implies
that the pointer is not NULL. That is, the following foo() would then
unconditionally return 0, even for foo(NULL, 0):
void bar(char *a, char *b);
int foo(char *a, size_t n)
{
bar(a, a + n);
return a == NULL;
}
In contrast to C, C++ explicitly allows null pointer + 0. So if
the above is compiled as C++ then there is no undefined behavior
in the foo(NULL, 0) call.
To me it seems that changing the C standard would be the sane
thing to do (just add one sentence) as it would ensure that a huge
amount of old code won't break in the future. Based on web searches
it seems that a large number of codebases (where null pointer + 0
occurs) are being fixed instead to be future-proof in case compilers
will some day optimize based on it (like making the above foo(NULL, 0)
return 0) which in the worst case will cause security bugs.
Some projects don't plan to change it. For example, gnulib and thus
many GNU tools currently require that null pointer + 0 is defined:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2021-11/msg00000.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Other-portability-assumptions.html
In XZ Utils null pointer + 0 issue should be fixed after this
commit. This adds a few if-statements and thus branches to avoid
null pointer + 0. These check for size > 0 instead of ptr != NULL
because this way bugs where size > 0 && ptr == NULL will likely
get caught quickly. None of them are in hot spots so it shouldn't
matter for performance.
A little less readable version would be replacing
ptr + offset
with
offset != 0 ? ptr + offset : ptr
or creating a macro for it:
#define my_ptr_add(ptr, offset) \
((offset) != 0 ? ((ptr) + (offset)) : (ptr))
Checking for offset != 0 instead of ptr != NULL allows GCC >= 8.1,
Clang >= 7, and Clang-based ICX to optimize it to the very same code
as ptr + offset. That is, it won't create a branch. So for hot code
this could be a good solution to avoid null pointer + 0. Unfortunately
other compilers like ICC 2021 or MSVC 19.33 (VS2022) will create a
branch from my_ptr_add().
Thanks to Marcin Kowalczyk for reporting the problem:
https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz/issues/36
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