In either C or C++, should I check pointer parameters against NULL/nullptr?

Question

This question was inspired by this answer.

I\'ve always been of the philosophy that the callee is never responsible when the caller does something stupid, like passi

Answer 1

Overhead of development time + runtime performance has a trade-off with the robustness of the API you are designing.

If the API you are publishing has to run inside the process of the calling routine, you SHOULD NOT check for NULL or invalid arguments. In this scenario, if you crash, the client program crashes and the developer using your API should mend his ways.

However, if you are providing a runtime/ framework which will run the client program inside it (e.g., you are writing a virtual machine or a middleware which can host the code or an operating system), you should definitely check of the correctness of the arguments passed. You don't want your program to be blamed for the mistakes of a plugin.