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Dangling pointers and wild pointers in computer programming are pointers that do not point to a valid object of the appropriate type. These are special cases of memory safety violations. More generally, dangling references and wild references are references that do not resolve to a valid destination.
Tombstones are a mechanism to detect dangling pointers and mitigate the problems they can cause in computer programs. Dangling pointers can appear in certain computer programming languages, e.g. C, C++ and assembly languages. A tombstone is a structure that acts as an intermediary between a pointer and its target, often heap-dynamic data in memory.
Locks-and-keys is a solution to dangling pointers in computer programming languages. The locks-and-keys approach represents pointers as ordered pairs (key, address) where the key is an integer value. Heap-dynamic variables are represented as the storage for the variable plus a cell for an integer lock value.
A dangling pointer is a pointer that does not point to a valid object and consequently may make a program crash or behave oddly. In the Pascal or C programming languages, pointers that are not specifically initialized may point to unpredictable addresses in memory. The following example code shows a dangling pointer:
Wild pointers arise when a pointer is used prior to initialization to some known state. They show the same erratic behaviour as dangling pointers, though they are less likely to stay undetected. They show the same erratic behaviour as dangling pointers, though they are less likely to stay undetected.
In other words, a wild branch is a function pointer that is wild (dangling). Detection of wild branches is frequently difficult; they are normally identified by erroneous results (where the unintended target address is nevertheless a valid instruction enabling the program to continue despite the error) or a hardware interrupt , which may change ...
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Failures to adhere to this pattern, such as memory usage after a call to free (dangling pointer) or before a call to malloc (wild pointer), calling free twice ("double free"), etc., usually causes a segmentation fault and results in a crash of the program. These errors can be transient and hard to debug – for example, freed memory is usually ...