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

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 6, 2022 13:38 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language by nybble41
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

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.

to post comments

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".