Accessing class members on a NULL pointer

Question

I was experimenting with C++ and found the below code as very strange.

class Foo{
public:
    virtual void say_virtual_hi(){
        std::cout << \"Vi         


        

Answer 1

a) It works because it does not dereference anything through the implicit "this" pointer. As soon as you do that, boom. I'm not 100% sure, but I think null pointer dereferences are done by RW protecting first 1K of memory space, so there is a small chance of nullreferencing not getting caught if you only dereference it past 1K line (ie. some instance variable that would get allocated very far, like:

 class A {
     char foo[2048];
     int i;
 }

then a->i would possibly be uncaught when A is null.

b) Nowhere, you only declared a pointer, which is allocated on main():s stack.