Understanding pointers May 28, 2016 on Drew DeVault's blog

I was recently chatting with a new contributor to Sway who is using the project as a means of learning C, and he had some questions about what void** meant when he found some in the code. It became apparent that this guy only has a basic grasp on pointers at this point in his learning curve, and I figured it was time for another blog post - so today, I’ll explain pointers.

To understand pointers, you must first understand how memory works. Your RAM is basically a flat array of octets. Your compiler describes every data structure you use as a series of octets. For the context of this article, let’s consider the following memory:

We can refer to each element of this array by its index, or address. For example, the value at address 0x0004 is 0x08. On this system, we’re using 16-bit addresses to refer to 8-bit values. On an i686 (32-bit) system, we use 32-bit addresses to refer to 8-bit values. On an amd64 (64-bit) system, we use 64-bit addresses to refer to 8-bit values. On Notch’s imaginary DCPU-16 system, we use 16-bit addresses to refer to 16-bit values.

To refer to the value at 0x0004, we can use a pointer. Let’s declare it like so:

uint8_t *value = (uint8_t *)0x0004;

Here we’re declaring a variable named value, whose type is uint8_t*. The * indicates that it’s a pointer. Now, because this is a 16-bit system, the size of a pointer is 16 bits. If we do this:

printf("%d\n", sizeof(value));

It will print 2, because it takes 16-bits (or 2 bytes) to refer to an address on this system, even though the value there is 8 bits. On your system it would probably print 8, or maybe 4 if you’re on a 32-bit system. We could also do this:

uint16_t address = 0x0004;
uint8_t *ptr = (uint8_t *)address;

In this case we’re not casting the uint16_t value 0x0004 to a uint8_t, which would truncate the integer. No, instead, we’re casting it to a uint8_t*, which is the size required to represent a pointer on this system. All pointers are the same size.

Dereferencing pointers

We can refer to the value at the other end of this pointer by dereferencing it. The pointer is said to contain a reference to a value in memory. By dereferencing it, we can obtain that value. For example:

uint8_t *value = (uint8_t *)0x0004;
printf("%d\n", *value); // prints 8

Working with multi-byte values

Even though memory is basically a big array of uint8_t, thankfully we can work with other kinds of data structures inside of it. For example, say we wanted to store the value 0x1234 in memory. This doesn’t fit in 8 bits, so we need to store it at two different addresses. For example, we could store it at 0x0006 and 0x0007:

*0x0007 makes up the first byte of the value, and *0x0006 makes up the second byte of the value.

C allows us to use pointers that refer to these sorts of composite values, like so:

uint16_t *value = (uint16_t *)0x0006;
printf("0x%X\n", *value); // Prints 0x1234

Here, we’ve declared a pointer to a value whose type is uint16_t. Note that the size of this pointer is the same size of the uint8_t* pointer - 16 bits, or two bytes. The value it references, though, is a different type than uint8_t* references.

Indirect pointers

Here comes the crazy part - you can work with pointers to pointers. The address of the uint16_t pointer we’ve been talking about is 0x0006, right? Well, we can store that number in memory as well. If we store it at 0x0002, our memory looks like this:

The question might then become, how do we get it out again? Well, we can use a pointer to that pointer! Check out this code:

uint16_t **pointer_to_a_pointer = (uint16_t**)0x0002;

This code just declared a variable whose type is uint16_t**, which a pointer whose value is a uint16_t*, which itself points to a value that is a uint16_t. Pretty cool, huh? We can dereference this too:

uint16_t **pointer_to_a_pointer = (uint16_t**)0x0002;
uint16_t *pointer = *pointer_to_a_pointer;
printf("0x%X\n", *pointer); // Prints 0x1234

We don’t actually even need the intermediate variable. This works too:

uint16_t **pointer_to_a_pointer = (uint16_t**)0x0002;
printf("0x%X\n", **pointer_to_a_pointer); // Prints 0x1234

Void pointers

The next question that would come up to your average C programmer would be, “well, what is a void*?” Well, remember earlier when I said that all pointers, regardless of the type of value they reference, are just fixed size integers? In the imaginary system we’ve been talking about, pointers are 16-bit addresses, or indexes, that refer to places in RAM. On the system you’re reading this article on, it’s probably a 64-bit integer. Well, we don’t actually need to specify the type to be able to manipulate pointers if they’re just a fixed size integer - so we don’t have to. A void* stores an arbitrary address without bringing along any type information. You can later cast this variable to a specific kind of pointer to dereference it. For example:

void *pointer = (void*)0x0006;
uint8_t *uintptr = (uint8_t*)pointer;
printf("0x%X", *uintptr); // prints 0x34

Take a closer look at this code, and recall that 0x0006 refers to a 16-bit value from the previous section. Here, though, we’re treating it as an 8-bit value - the void* contains no assumptions about what kind of data is there. The result is that we end up treating it like an 8-bit integer, which ends up being the least significant byte of 0x1234;

Dereferencing structures

In C, we often work with structs. Let’s describe one to play with:

struct coordinates {
    uint16_t x, y;
    struct coordinates *next;
};

Our structure describes a linked list of coordinates. X and Y are the coordinates, and next is a pointer to the next set of coordinates in our list. I’m going to drop two of these in memory:

Let’s write some C code to reason about this memory with:

struct coordinates *coords;
coords = (struct coordinates*)0x0000;

If we look at this structure in memory, you might already be able to pick out the values. C is going to store the fields of this struct in order. So, we can expect the following:

printf("0x%X, 0x%X", coords->x, coords->y);

To print out “0xDEAD, 0xBEEF”. Note that we’re using the structure dereferencing operator here, ->. This allows us to dereference values inside of a structure we have a pointer to. The other case is this:

printf("0x%X, 0x-X", coords.x, coords.y);

Which only works if coords is not a pointer. We also have a pointer within this structure named next. You can see in the memory I included above that its address is 0x0004 and its value is 0x0006 - meaning that there’s another struct coordinates that lives at 0x0006 in memory. If you look there, you can see the first part of it. It’s X coordinate is 0x1234.

Pointer arithmetic

In C, we can use math on pointers. For example, we can do this:

uint8_t *addr = (uint8_t*)0x1000;
addr++;

Which would make the value of addr 0x1001. But this is only true for pointers whose type is 1 byte in size. Consider this:

uint16_t *addr = (uint16_t*)0x1000;
addr++;

Here, addr becomes 0x1002! This is because ++ on a pointer actually adds sizeof(type) to the actual address stored. The idea is that if we only added one, we’d be referring to an address that is in the middle of a uint16_t, rather than the next uint16_t in memory that we meant to refer to. This is also how arrays work. The following two code snippets are equivalent:

uint16_t *addr = (uint16_t*)0x1000;
printf("%d\n", *(addr + 1));

uint16_t *addr = (uint16_t*)0x1000;
printf("%d\n", addr[1]);

NULL pointers

Sometimes you need to work with a pointer that points to something that may not exist yet, or a resource that has been freed. In this case, we use a NULL pointer. In the examples you’ve seen so far, 0x0000 is a valid address. This is just for simplicity’s sake. In practice, pretty much no modern computer has any reason to refer to the value at address 0. For that reason, we use NULL to refer to an uninitialized pointer. Dereferencing a NULL pointer is generally a Bad Thing and will lead to segfaults. As a fun side effect, since NULL is 0, we can use it in an if statement:

void *ptr = ...;
if (ptr) {
    // ptr is valid
} else {
    // ptr is not valid
}

I hope you found this article useful! If you’d like something fun to read next, read about “three star programmers”, or programmers who have variables like void***.