CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers

Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers.
Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leading to the proliferation of bugs and vulnerabilities.
This article explores common misconceptions about null pointers held by many programmers, starting with simple fallacies and working our way up to the weirdest cases. Some of them will be news only to beginners, while others may lead experts down the path of meticulous fact-checking. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: bot
FUZIX FUZIX is a fusion of various elements from the assorted UZI forks and branches beaten together into some kind of semi-coherent pla...
New
First poster: mafinar
F# Is The Best Coding Language Today. If you want to personally pick up a programming language in order to become a better coder in what...
New
First poster: Maartz
This Keyboard Lets People Type So Fast It’s Banned From Typing Competitions. A new peripheral lets you keep typing without ever lifting ...
New
First poster: dimitarvp
A career ending mistake — Bitfield Consulting. As software engineers, we’re constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to...
New
OvermindDL1
Yet another rust-made text editor, though I’m really liking the looks of how this one works!
New
CommunityNews
GitHub - livekit/livekit: Scalable, high-performance WebRTC SFU. SDKs in JavaScript, React, React Native, Flutter, Swift, Kotlin, Unity/C...
New
First poster: bot
Raspberry Pi security alarm — the basics. In November last year — I started building a DIY security alarm system, using a Raspberry Pi a...
New
New
First poster: alvinkatojr
Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvem...
New
CommunityNews
The French originated the meter in the 1790s as one/ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along a meridian thr...
New

Other popular topics Top

Devtalk
Reading something? Working on something? Planning something? Changing jobs even!? If you’re up for sharing, please let us know what you’...
1063 23050 405
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Stop developing web apps with yesterday’s tools. Today, developers are increasingly adopting Clojure as a web-development platform. See f...
New
AstonJ
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of comments relating to the sound of a keyboard, with one of the most desirable of these called ‘thock’, he...
New
AstonJ
Thanks to @foxtrottwist’s and @Tomas’s posts in this thread: Poll: Which code editor do you use? I bought Onivim! :nerd_face: https://on...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use WebRTC to build web applications that stream media and data in real time directly from one user to another, all in the browser. ...
New
New
First poster: AstonJ
Jan | Rethink the Computer. Jan turns your computer into an AI machine by running LLMs locally on your computer. It’s a privacy-focus, l...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fight complexity and reclaim the original spirit of agility by learning to simplify how you develop software. The result: a more humane a...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
A concise guide to MySQL 9 database administration, covering fundamental concepts, techniques, and best practices. Neil Smyth MySQL...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use advanced functional programming principles, practical Domain-Driven Design techniques, and production-ready Elixir code to build scal...
New