Don't cast to void* and then to another type with a different alignment(DRAFT)

Architectures are free to define the byte alignment of the fundamental types of C. Typically, there are several different possible alignments used by the fundamental types (proportional to their size). By definition of C99, a pointer may be cast into and out of void* without warning. Thus it is possible to silently switch from one type of pointer to another without a warning by first storing or casting the initial pointer to void* and then storing or casting it to the final type. Because of all of these things, it is possible to silently switch the pointer type, which means that if that pointer is dereferenced and the alignment is different, it might cause the program to terminate abnormally.

Non-compliant Code Example

char *loop_ptr;
int *int_ptr;

int *loop_function(void *v_pointer){
  return v_pointer;
}
int_ptr = loop_function(loop_ptr);

This example should compile without warning, but v_pointer might be aligned on a 1 byte boundary. Once it is cast to an int some architectures will require it to be on 4 byte boundaries. If int_ptr is then later dereferenced, the program might be killed.

Compliant Solution

In this compliant solution, the parameter is changed to only accept other int* pointers since the input parameter directly influences the output parameter.

int *loop_ptr;
int * int_ptr;

int *loopFunction(int *v_pointer) {
  return v_pointer;
}
int_ptr = loopFunction(loop_ptr);

Implementation Details

List of common alignments for Microsoft, Borland, and GNU compilers to x86

Risk Assessment

Accessing a pointer that is no longer on the correct access boundary can cause a program to crash, give wrong information or have slow pointer accesses (if the architecture does not care about alignment).

References

[[Bryant 03]]
[[ISO/IEC 9899-1999:TC2]] Section 6.2.5, "Types"