Can an equality comparison of unrelated pointers evaluate to true?

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Can an equality comparison of unrelated pointers evaluate to true?

Yes, but …

int a;
int b;
printf("a precedes b: %d\n", (&a + 1) == &b);
printf("b precedes a: %d\n", (&b + 1) == &a);

There are, by my interpretation of the C standard, three possibilities:

  • a immediately precedes b
  • b immediately precedes a
  • neither a nor b immediately precedes the other (there could be a gap, or another object, between them)

I played around with this some time ago and concluded that GCC was performing an invalid optimization on the == operator for pointers, making it yield false even when the addresses are the same, so I submitted a bug report:

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=63611

That bug was closed as a duplicate of another report:

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=61502

The GCC maintainers who responded to these bug reports seem to be of the opinion that adjacency of two objects need not be consistent and that the comparison of their addresses might show them to be adjacent or not, within the same run of the program. As you can see from my comments on the second Bugzilla ticket, I strongly disagree. In my opinion, without consistent behavior of the == operator, the standard’s requirements for adjacent objects is meaningless, and I think we have to assume that those words are not merely decorative.

Here’s a simple test program:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void) {
    int x;
    int y;
    printf("&x = %p\n&y = %p\n", (void*)&x, (void*)&y);
    if (&y == &x + 1) {
        puts("y immediately follows x");
    }
    else if (&x == &y + 1) {
        puts("x immediately follows y");
    }
    else {
        puts("x and y are not adjacent");
    }
}

When I compile it with GCC 6.2.0, the printed addresses of x and y differ by exactly 4 bytes at all optimization levels, but I get y immediately follows x only at -O0; at -O1, -O2, and -O3 I get x and y are not adjacent. I believe this is incorrect behavior, but apparently, it’s not going to be fixed.

clang 3.8.1, in my opinion, behaves correctly, showing x immediately follows y at all optimization levels. Clang previously had a problem with this; I reported it:

https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21327

and it was corrected.

I suggest not relying on comparisons of addresses of possibly adjacent objects behaving consistently.

(Note that relational operators (<, <=, >, >=) on pointers to unrelated objects have undefined behavior, but equality operators (==, !=) are generally required to behave consistently.)

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