alt Hacker NewsDoes this work in practice? Now you have a bunch of invalid but non-NULL pointers flying around. NULL checks which would normally prevent you from accessing invalid pointers now will pass and send you along to deref your bogus pointer.
Even hacking the compiler to treat -1 as equal to NULL as well wouldn't work since lots of software won't free NULL-like pointers.
> NULL checks which would normally prevent you from accessing invalid pointers now will pass and send you along to deref your bogus pointer.
Oddly, this is bog standard implementation specific behavior for standard C - caller accessing any result of malloc(0) is undefined behavior, and malloc(0) isn't required to return NULL - the reference heap didn't, and some probably still don't.