May 15th, 2017

At least it wasn’t on a Web page with the warning “Beware of the leopard”

In my discussion of the effect of ASLR on DLL rebasing, I wondered how vtables and other function pointers were handled in position-independent code. Commenter kantos replied, “It appears from a cursory google search that…”

I wanted to find out more, so I did some searching but couldn’t find anything, so I asked for help with that cursory search.

“It was GCC PIC C++ which didn’t get me to the answer directly, I had to go through the SO question that was the second result to get to this document by Ulrich Drepper, and then skim through until page 29 where it describes what’s done in the virtual table case.”

Okay, so I had to issue a Google search, click the second result, then go to the second answer (not the accepted answer), click a link enigmatically called “the document referenced by 0x6adb015”, download the resulting 45-page PDF, and read through to page 29.

This doesn’t strike me as a “cursory search”.

Related: The more times you use the word “simply” in your instructions, the more I suspect you don’t know what that word means.

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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