NULL definition

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Oct 31 17:05, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> while working on something completely different, I stumbled over the
> definition of NULL in newlib.
> 
> Throughout newlib, NULL is defined like this:
> 
>   #ifndef NULL
>   #define NULL 0
>   #endif
> 
> The problem with this definition is that it's not quite wrong, but
> also not really correct, according to POSIX.1-2008:
> 
>    The <stddef.h> header shall define the following macros:
>    NULL
>       Null pointer constant. ^[CX] [Option Start]  The macro shall
>       expand to an integer constant expression with the value 0 cast
>       to type void *. [Option End]
> 
> Even if you ignore the optional part, the important snippet here is
> that NULL expands to a Null *pointer* value.  However, our definition
> of NULL is just 0, so it is of type int.  But on many targets
> sizeof(int) is != sizeof(void*).  This could potentially result in size
> problems.
> 
> So, given that we already rely on stddef.h anyway throughout our header
> files, I wonder if we shouldn't change the definition of NULL by
> including stddef.h as well, so we always get it right:
> 
>   #define __need_NULL
>   #include <stddef.h>

I've checked in a matching patch.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen
Cygwin Project Co-Leader
Red Hat