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Memory corruption occurs in a computer program when the contents of a memory location are modified due to programmatic behavior that exceeds the intention of the original programmer or program/language constructs; this is termed as violation of memory safety. The most likely causes of memory corruption are programming errors (software bugs ...
Not only are uninitialized variables a frequent cause of bugs, but this kind of bug is particularly serious because it may not be reproducible: for instance, a variable may remain uninitialized only in some branch of the program. In some cases, programs with uninitialized variables may even pass software tests.
This most often occurs due to jumping over the initialization, not by omitting it. Most compilers are able to warn about this. int f ( int i ) { char * dp ; /* dp is a wild pointer */ static char * scp ; /* scp is not a wild pointer: * static variables are initialized to 0 * at start and retain their values from * the last call afterwards.
Dereferencing any of these variables could cause a segmentation fault: dereferencing the null pointer generally will cause a segfault, while reading from the wild pointer may instead result in random data but no segfault, and reading from the dangling pointer may result in valid data for a while, and then random data as it is overwritten.
In C++, because dereferencing a null pointer is undefined behavior, compiler optimizations may cause other checks to be removed, leading to vulnerabilities elsewhere in the code. [ 29 ] [ 30 ] Some lists may also include race conditions (concurrent reads/writes to shared memory) as being part of memory safety (e.g., for access control).
This shows the typical layout of a simple computer's program memory with the text, various data, and stack and heap sections. Historically, BSS (from Block Started by Symbol) is a pseudo-operation in UA-SAP (United Aircraft Symbolic Assembly Program), the assembler developed in the mid-1950s for the IBM 704 by Roy Nutt, Walter Ramshaw, and others at United Aircraft Corporation.
In some programming language environments (at least one proprietary Lisp implementation, for example), [citation needed] the value used as the null pointer (called nil in Lisp) may actually be a pointer to a block of internal data useful to the implementation (but not explicitly reachable from user programs), thus allowing the same register to be used as a useful constant and a quick way of ...
C++26 is the informal name for the version of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 14882 standard for the C++ programming language that follows C++23. The current working draft of this version is N4981.