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> you surrender control over your build's success to the whims of the same people who think that it's okay that memcpy(0, 0, 0) is undefined behavior.

You mean the people who write the specs of the language? Well you surrender control to these folks when you decided to pick this language!

Otherwise the problem about memcpy of zero-size and nullptr is unfortunate from compiler engineers (at least clang engineers) point of view. The story is that the compiler is optimizing based on programmer annotations: after all if a programmer takes the effort to annotate their APIs, let's benefit from this. However the GNU libc annotated `memcpy` (and others) with this non_null attribute, causing this fragility on invalid (according to the spec) but common code.

Opinion of clang authors is somehow "Deleting a null pointer check on p after a memcpy(p, q, 0) call seems extremely user-hostile, and very unlikely to result in a valuable improvement to the program".

Clang dev thread: http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2017-January/052066....

Note in this thread that clang devs are trying to get the language changed to remove this UB.




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