Is the pointer guaranteed to be > a certain value?

Question

In C++ when i do new (or even malloc) is there any guarantee that the return address will be greater than a certain value? Because... in this project i find it

Answer 1

In theory, no -- a pointer's not even guaranteed to be > 0. However, in practice, viewed as an unsigned integer (don't forget that a pointer may have a high-order "1" bit), no system that I know of would have a pointer value less than about 1000. But relying on that is relying on "undefined behavior".

Answer 2

It's very platform-specific, so I would discourage relying on this kind of information unless you have a very good reason and are aware of consequences for portability, maintainability etc.

NULL is guaranteed to be 0x0 always. If I recall correctly, x86 reserves the first 128 MB of address space as "NULL-equivalent", so that valid pointers can't take on values in this range. On x64 there are some additional addresses which you shouldn't encounter in practice, at least for now.

As for address space reserved for the operating system, it will clearly depend on the OS. On Linux, the kernel-user space division is configurable in the kernel, so at least the 3 splits: 1-3 GB, 2-2 GB and 3-1 GB are common on 32-bit systems. You can find more details on kerneltrap.

Answer 3

There is no standard for where valid memory addresses come from; to write safe system-independent code, you cannot rely on certain addresses (and even with anecdotal support, you never know when that will change with a new system update).

Answer 4

In terms of standard, there is nothing. But in reality, it depends on the target OS, windows for instance reserves the first 64kb of memory as a no-mans land (depending on the build it is read-only memory, else it is marked as PAGE_NOACCESS), while it uses the upper 0x80000000+ for kernel memory, but it can be changed, see this & this on MSDN.

On x64 you can also use the higher bits of the address (only 47bits are used for addresses currently), but its not such a good idea, as later on it will change and your program will break (AMD who set the standard also advise against it).

Answer 5

There's no such guarantee. You can try using placement new if you need very specific memory locations but it has certain problems that you'll have to work hard to avoid. Why don't you try using a map with an integer key that has the pointer as its value instead? That way you wouldn't have to rely on specific memory addresses and ranges.