void *x = alloca(0);
  void *y;
  int is_x_null = (x == NULL);
  memcpy(&y, &x, sizeof(y)); // confuse the optimizer
  assert(is_x_null == (y == NULL));

If you argue that alloca(0) is 'undefined behavior', of course, all this goes out the window. Since alloca is not standardized, though, one can't really argue this - all of alloca's behavior is implementation-defined, and so if llvm-gcc really wants alloca(0) to be UB, it should document this fact as a porting concern.

Incidentally, all of this applies to malloc(0) as well. C99 defines malloc(0)'s behavior as follows:

> If the size of the space requested is zero, the behavior is implementation- defined: either a null pointer is returned, or the behavior is as if the size were some nonzero value, except that the returned pointer shall not be used to access an object.

This is actually even stricter than 'unspecified', in that it requires the implementation to document which choice it takes.

While you would expect a comparison to another pointer to be legal, I don't believe it has to be consistent. That's the whole point of undefined behavior. In one sense, it's like the question of whether NaN == NaN. In many implementations, that expression is not necessarily true--even though based on your pointer example logic it should be.

Referencing the OP: the real problem here is not that the NULL check got optimized out and so seemed inconsistent. That's within the tolerance of C's undefined behavior (which is designed for optimizations like this and is what makes it so hard to write truly sane C code.) The real problem is a bug with the code as written. One should never check against and undefined result. Instead there should have been an initial boolean guard against the case of alloca'ing 0 bytes. I __could__ see an argument for expecting that to be always null (in fact, that's the argument for higher level languages!) But expecting it to be a specific value in relation to the stack? That seems arbitrary at best.

Right, this is a question of whether alloca(0) is undefined behavior, an unspecified return value, or implementation-defined behavior. And I argue that alloca's behavior is implementation-defined in the first place, so it LLVM-gcc wants alloca(0) to be UB it needs to define that :)

??? I would expect that it always succeeds. Rationale: if, at some time and place, alloca(n) succeeds, I expect that any alloca asking for less space would succeed, too.

It's true that alloca is all implementation-defined, but do you know of an implementation where the value of alloca(0) is defined? On OS X, it is not defined.

Comparing alloca(0) to malloc(0) is off-base. The return value from malloc(0) has an important requirement that alloca(0) lacks: you must be able to pass the result to free(). Therefore, the compiler can't have it be an arbitrary value, whereas replacing all calls to alloca(0) with (void *)arc4random() would be (aside from the side effect of calling arc4random()) a valid transformation.

Not really. I can't reproduce the optimizer bug here (on the contrary, the optimizer in the version of llvm-gcc I have installed seems to assume it is null[1]), but if alloca() is returning null and the optimizer assumes it's non-null, the value will be treated as non-null in the function but null if, say, the value is passed into a non-inline function which compares it to null.

[1] i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.1.00)

That said, http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/mal... explicitly mentions that malloc(0) is implementation-defined, not undefined. It would seem strange to me if alloca(0) is supposed to be undefined instead of implementation-defined.

C also doesn't define "the stack" in any way. And of course alloca() isn't part of C at all, but on the systems where it exists, it's not very specific about just where it allocates stuff, just that it's on that nebulous "the stack".

Given the above, I believe you cannot write a conforming program that can detect the difference between alloca(0) returning a region of 0 bytes at the end of the stack and alloca(0) returning something else. Since no conforming program can detect it, the "as if" rule allows the return value to be considered to be anything at all.

Any use of alloca() on the other hand seems risky. Similar arguments could be made about the semantics of jmp_bufs, which also get used to get a handle on the stack.

That's not an assumption, that's how the free() function is defined to work by the language standard. It never ceases to astound me how many otherwise good C programmers think free(NULL) is an error.

When you refer to simplifying assumptions, are you talking about assumptions made by the programmer, or by the compiler and libc? For example, the POSIX manual page[0] for free( void* ptr ) says, "If ptr is a null pointer, no action shall occur." The malloc manpage says, "If size is 0, either a null pointer or a unique pointer that can successfully passed to free() shall be returned." That sounds more like a definition than an assumption to me. What am I missing?

[0] Obtained by installing manpages-posix-dev on Ubuntu and running man 3posix free.