DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language [LWN.net]

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 5, 2022 19:12 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language by farnz
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

> The null pointer remains a unique value; …

Unique, yes—there is only one null pointer value—but not distinct from any pointer to an object or function. With the -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks flag enabled you can have a pointer to a valid object which compares equal to a null pointer.

> I don't see how the snippets you've quoted make it impossible for this function's return value to differ from its deref_null parameter.

(I am assuming that "ℜ_val" in your example was supposed to be "&real_val". I'm not sure of the purpose of the unused pointer variable "foo".)

According to ISO C++, with the "*bar = 0" line deleted, the return value must be equal to "deref_null". The "bar" pointer can only be "nullptr" when deref_null is true or "&real_val" when deref_null is false, and "&real_val", as a pointer to an object, can never compare equal to "nullptr". With the "*bar = 0" line it's UB when deref_null is true and so could be optimized to just "return false", as you said.

However, with the -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks is enabled, we do not have the guarantees of ISO C++ and "nullptr" could in theory compare equal to a pointer to an object, e.g. if pointers are represented as byte addresses, "nullptr" is represented as byte address zero, and the object (in this case "real_val") happens to be placed at byte address zero. If this happened then "bar == nullptr" would be true even if deref_null is false, so the function cannot be optimized to just "return deref_null".

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 6, 2022 13:38 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (3 responses)

Sorry about the bad code formatting - I have no idea how copying and pasting from Emacs did that.

I don't see how you get "not distinct from any pointer to an object or function" from the description of the -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks flag. As I read the documentation, -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks does not permit you to have a pointer to a valid object that compares equal to a null pointer; instead it says that the act of dereferencing a pointer implies nothing about its value. Without the flag, dereferencing a pointer implies the pointer value must not be a null pointer, since if it was a null pointer, the dereference would result in UB (since a null pointer cannot point to a valid object). With the flag, however, while the dereference itself is still UB (since a null pointer cannot point to a valid object), the compiler acts as-if each dereference of a nullptr was immediately followed by an assignment of an unknown value to the pointer.

Because the value is unknown, it could still be a null pointer, but it could also be a new pointer to a valid object - the compiler's analysis passes simply don't know at this point, and thus it cannot rely on the dereference to permit it to remove a nullptr check, since it does not know what the pointer's value is.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 6, 2022 14:55 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (1 responses)

> I don't see how you get "not distinct from any pointer to an object or function" from the description of the -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks flag.

The default is -fdelete-null-pointer-checks, which has the description: "Assume that programs cannot safely dereference null pointers, and that no code or data element resides at address zero."[0] The -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks flag affects *both* of these assumptions, meaning that the compiler cannot assume "that no code or data element resides at address zero" (i.e. that no pointer to an object has the same representation as a null pointer).

As stated in the documentation the intended use of the -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks flag is platforms such as AVR where objects *can* be placed at address zero, which implies that &variable can be indistinguishable from a null pointer. Though this is more likely to be true for a global or static object than for a stack variable.

[0] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#...

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 6, 2022 16:52 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Thanks for clearing up my misunderstanding - for some reason, I was mentally skipping the second assumption (since on my platforms of choice,there cannot be a code or data element at address 0, and only focusing on the first assumption (that programs cannot safely dereference null pointers, which is the one that allows a compiler to deduce that if you dereference a pointer, it cannot be a null pointer).

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 6, 2022 17:26 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

> Sorry about the bad code formatting - I have no idea how copying and pasting from Emacs did that.

ampersand is the HTML/XML metacharacter for starting an entity, and although the standard says that entity references should include a final semicolon, HTML-handling software is more tolerant of the missing semicolon than is entirely ideal.

So it appears that the sequence &real gets overgenerously interpreted as an HTML entity equivalent to Unicode codepoint U+211C BLACK-LETTER CAPITAL R from the Letterlike Symbols block of the Mathematical Symbols, which has an alias name of "Real part".