I thought that was a typo or the forum software removed something, but no - it's a pointer to an empty string literal. If I understand how that works, this creates a null byte (in the read-only memory section of the compiled output?) and points to it. Before this line it checks if p is NULL.
I wonder what is the advantage of doing this? Maybe to make sure that p is an actual pointer, so later code can just make that assumption.
That makes sense, with that "guard" at the top, the rest of the function can return the pointer anywhere. And I imagine the compiler will ensure the empty string literal is created only once. Good to know!
WTF is just kinda funny. Seen it used in loggers too log.wtf("this should never happen")
yikes
I wonder what is the advantage of doing this? Maybe to make sure that p is an actual pointer, so later code can just make that assumption.
Or put another way, it tightens the API/contract of that chunk of code to always return a valid string.