Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack

Have always wondered, why can’t nested functions just be normal functions inside a namespace?

It seems silly to expose a tiny helper to the entire compilation unit when it is only meant to be used inside one function…

Self-modifying code is cool. It's a shame we had to disable it for security.

Related: previous article in the series, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308685 (103 points, 47 comments)

At first, I was annoyed by having to read AT&T syntax. Then I was disoriented by realizing the next snippet was in AT&T syntax without the '%' sigil for registers. But the technique is cool.

What do you need the executable stack for? You call using a function pointer, there's no executable read/write memory involved in using a function pointer.