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Doubly Linked Lists And Bugs

Ewald Cress explains a bug in DBCC PAGE:

Let’s start with the safety convention. The “null” of a null pointer isn’t a magic value, but in real-life implementation is simply zero, which is a perfectly valid virtual address. However, on the premise that trying to access address zero or addresses near it probably indicates a program error, the OS will map that page in such a way that trying to access it causes an access violation. This is not a bug or an accident, but a damn clever feature! Robert Love explains it very nicely over here for Linux, and it applies equally to Windows.

Now recall the convention that trying to retrieve the head or tail of an empty list will – by convention – bring you back a null pointer. When iterating, a related convention may also return a zero when you’ve gone all the way around and come back to the list head. Clearly the onus is on the developer to recognise that null pointer and not dereference it, but attempting to do so sets in motion the safety feature of an access violation, which can then be neatly caught through standard exception handling, for instance yielding a diagnostic stack dump.

Very interesting article, and also a good juxtaposition of supported, “production-safe” code versus undocumented processes.