Re:Linux Kernel Use-After-Free Remote Code Execution Vulnera...
by jjnoakes on Wednesday October 05, 2016 @02:31PM
(#12646479)
If you are writing a code generator, it all depends on the source language. If, for example, your source language doesn't have NULL pointers, then you don't have to waste cycles checking them in C.
The problem is this line of reasoning doesn't generally hold up when applied to C codebases (because in practice statistics catches up with you eventually) and C code generators, in effect, happen to contain an admittedly small but rather obfuscated C codebase.
Moreover, you must always include such checks - manually crashing on e.g. null pointers even if you'd be entirely satisfied with a segfault - just to avoid the optimizer potentially going apeshit on your code. Which can have... poor effects on program performance.