Exactly, though in the case I bet you're remembering, the pointer was dereferenced before the null check so the latter was optimized out. http://lwn.net/Articl

Exactly, though in the case I bet you're remembering, the pointer was dereferenced before the null check so the latter was optimized out. http://lwn.net/Articles/342330/ http://lwn.net/Articles/342330/