Pointer Types

Unsafe as they are, pointers are not something we can live without. Even languages without pointers (like Basic or Java) have pointers – to classes and interfaces!

Pointers has always been considered an unsafe tool which could easily cause a program to crash or (worse!) silently corrupt user data. The worst thing is, it’s impossible to perform the complete analysis of pointer-related correctness at compile time without imposing crippling limitations on the whole ecosystem of pointer operations available to developers. Bottom line is, invalid pointer accesses can and will happen at runtime.

So what is safety, then?

We will call a pointer “safe” if it’s impossible to either crash a process or corrupt user data by accessing this pointer. This means that any invalid pointer access must be caught and handled by the language runtime.

• Data Pointers
• Class Pointers
• Const-correctness
• Function Pointers
• Property Pointers