obliterate

[Brad Anderson]

On Wednesday, 13 November 2013 at 00:33:17 UTC, Andrei 
Alexandrescu wrote:
> Hello,
>
>
> I will soon get to work on typed allocators; I figured there 
> will be some issues percolating to untyped allocators that will 
> require design changes (hopefully minor).
>
> For starters, I want to define a function that "obliterates" an 
> object, i.e. makes it almost surely unusable and not obeying 
> its own invariants. At the same time, that state should be 
> entirely reproducible and memory-safe.
>
> Here's what I'm thinking. First, obliterate calls the 
> destructor if present and then writes the fields as follows:
>
> * unsigned integers: t.max / 2
>
> * signed integers: t.min / 2
>
> * characters: ?
>
> * Pointers and class references: size_t.max - 65_535, i.e. 64K 
> below the upper memory limit. On all systems I know it can be 
> safely assumed that that area will cause GPF when accessed.
>
> * Arrays: some weird length (like 17), and also starting at 
> size_t.max minus the memory occupied by the array.
>
> * floating point numbers: NaN, or some ridiculous value like 
> F.max / 2?
>
>
>
> Andrei

Perhaps these are of interest:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/127404/216300