> Treating null pointer as an empty string (perhaps by expecting them first N pages to contain just \0 bytes, as various older Unix systems predating Linux did)

> Treating null pointer as an empty string (perhaps by expecting them first N pages to contain just \0 bytes, as various older Unix systems predating Linux did) feels like a recipe to hide bugs. Empty string is not a 'zero-sized object'. It's an object with size of one byte that is zero.