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From: =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
To: Alexander Best <alexbestms@wwu.de>
References: <permail-200911101617381e86ffa80000015a-a_best01@message-id.uni-muenster.de>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:13:43 +0100
In-Reply-To: <permail-200911101617381e86ffa80000015a-a_best01@message-id.uni-muenster.de>
	(Alexander Best's message of "Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:17:38 +0100 (CET)")
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Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org>,
	Nate Eldredge <nate@thatsmathematics.com>
Subject: Re: [patch] burncd: honour for envar SPEED
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Alexander Best <alexbestms@wwu.de> writes:
> you're right. hundreds of functions cause segfaults when arg or args
> are NULL.  either we add safety checks for all of them (massive
> overhead) or just leave them the way they are.

The consensus in the C community is that adding such checks does more
harm than good, because a NULL pointer is usually a symptom of a bug
somewhere else in the application, and checking for a NULL pointer will
either hide that bug or trigger another error somewhere down the line,
possibly making the real bug harder to find, rather than easier.

(next week's topic: the return value of malloc(0)...)

DES
--=20
Dag-Erling Sm=C3=B8rgrav - des@des.no