Fun with NULL pointers, part 1

(2) Gcc certainly should have a warning for this. However, putting such a warning in "-W" would make people upset (see (1)). That's not meant to be an argument against. It might be easier to get it into -Wall, but it is generally very hard to move a warning from -W to -Wall or the reverse, so if it gets into -Wall it is probably stuck there forever. The warning would likely be issued only when compiling with strong optimization; without optimization the compiler would be unlikely to perform the analysis that would lead to it noticing the problem.

(3) Depending on the offset within the struct type pointed to, the pointer value dereferenced might not refer to zero page, and thus might not trigger a SEGV signal in normal user-level code, even without memory-mapping games.