Advanced C++ Programming Cookbook

Null-pointer dereferences

A more common type of problem in C++ is a null-pointer dereference, as follows:

int main(void){    int *p = 0;    *p = 42;}

This results in the following:

In the preceding example, we create a pointer to an integer and set it to 0 (that is, a NULL pointer). We then dereference the NULL pointer and set its value, resulting in a segmentation fault, which UBSAN is capable of detecting as the program crashes.