X-Git-Url: https://git.ralfj.de/web.git/blobdiff_plain/d966a7f819c1f85cbe024ce66f1e28604f9bd658..fac47c7e7858bb53393bb1bcbe30e5b64509d250:/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md?ds=sidebyside diff --git a/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md b/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md index f3c9133..23371fe 100644 --- a/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md +++ b/personal/_posts/2018-07-24-pointers-and-bytes.md @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ --- title: "Pointers Are Complicated, or: What's in a Byte?" -categories: internship rust +categories: internship rust programming forum: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pointers-are-complicated-or-whats-in-a-byte/8045 --- @@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ It would be beneficial to be able to optimize the final read of `y[0]` to just r C++ compilers regularly perform such optimizations as they are crucial for generating high-quality assembly.[^perf] The justification for this optimization is that writing to `x_ptr`, which points into `x`, cannot change `y`. -[^perf]: To be fair, the are *claimed* to be crucial for generating high-quality assembly. The claim sounds plausible to me, but unfortunately, I do not know of a systematic study exploring the performance benefits of undefined behavior such as this. +[^perf]: To be fair, the are *claimed* to be crucial for generating high-quality assembly. The claim sounds plausible to me, but unfortunately, I do not know of a systematic study exploring the performance benefits of such optimizations. However, given how low-level a language C++ is, we can actually break this assumption by setting `i` to `y-x`. Since `&x[i]` is the same as `x+i`, this means we are actually writing `23` to `&y[0]`. @@ -79,7 +79,7 @@ It does *not* point at an actual element of another object *even if they have th The key point here is that just because `x_ptr` and `&y[0]` point to the same *address*, that does not make them *the same pointer*, i.e., they cannot be used interchangeably: `&y[0]` points to the first element of `y`; `x_ptr` points past the end of `x`. -If we replace `*x_ptr = 23` by `*&y[0] = 0`, we change the meaning of the program, even though the two pointers have been tested for equality. +If we replace `*x_ptr = 23` by `*&y[0] = 23`, we change the meaning of the program, even though the two pointers have been tested for equality. This is worth repeating: