• R
    use a common definition of NULL as 0L for C and C++ · 41d7c77d
    Rich Felker 提交于
    the historical mess of having different definitions for C and C++
    comes from the historical C definition as (void *)0 and the fact that
    (void *)0 can't be used in C++ because it does not convert to other
    pointer types implicitly. however, using plain 0 in C++ exposed bugs
    in C++ programs that call variadic functions with NULL as an argument
    and (wrongly; this is UB) expect it to arrive as a null pointer. on
    64-bit machines, the high bits end up containing junk. glibc dodges
    the issue by using a GCC extension __null to define NULL; this is
    observably non-conforming because a conforming application could
    observe the definition of NULL via stringizing and see that it is
    neither an integer constant expression with value zero nor such an
    expression cast to void.
    
    switching to 0L eliminates the issue and provides compatibility with
    broken applications, since on all musl targets, long and pointers have
    the same size, representation, and argument-passing convention. we
    could maintain separate C and C++ definitions of NULL (i.e. just use
    0L on C++ and use (void *)0 on C) but after careful analysis, it seems
    extremely difficult for a C program to even determine whether NULL has
    integer or pointer type, much less depend in subtle, unintentional
    ways, on whether it does. C89 seems to have no way to make the
    distinction. on C99, the fact that (int)(void *)0 is not an integer
    constant expression, along with subtle VLA/sizeof semantics, can be
    used to make the distinction, but many compilers are non-conforming
    and give the wrong result to this test anyway. on C11, _Generic can
    trivially make the distinction, but it seems unlikely that code
    targetting C11 would be so backwards in caring which definition of
    NULL an implementation uses.
    
    as such, the simplest path of using the same definition for NULL in
    both C and C++ was chosen. the #undef directive was also removed so
    that the compiler can catch and give a warning or error on
    redefinition if buggy programs have defined their own versions of
    NULL prior to inclusion of standard headers.
    41d7c77d
unistd.h 14.0 KB