How does dereferencing of a function pointer happen?

Question

Why and how does dereferencing a function pointer just \"do nothing\"?

This is what I am talking about:

#include

void hello() { print         


        

Answer 1

Put yourself in the shoes of the compiler writer. A function pointer has a well defined meaning, it is a pointer to a blob of bytes that represent machine code.

What do you do when the programmer dereferences a function pointer? Do you take the first (or 8) bytes of the machine code and reinterpret that as a pointer? Odds are about 2 billion to one that this won't work. Do you declare UB? Plenty of that going around already. Or do you just ignore the attempt? You know the answer.