I'm confused by the assertion that a source code audit would catch nothing. Even if the auditors didn't know that the check would be optimised away, the code i

I'm confused by the assertion that a source code audit would catch nothing. Even if the auditors didn't know that the check would be optimised away, the code is very unnatural. Normally you check if a pointer is NULL and then deference it. In a code review, every time I see a pointer dereference I'm thinking: "how do we know that's not NULL?". So a check afterwards should not keep this code from being caught by auditors.