Sometimes, casting is just inevitable. And then there’s even not much science behind it, at least it seems so. Once some address is provided in a variable of the right size, a typed pointer can be casted out of it, and then the object can be accessed via its members and methods as usual. In some situations it is really easy to get the casting wrong, leading to interesting bugs. This article describes an example situation and a proper fix.

Imagine we have a base class C , which inherits from B , which inherits from A . They all have one int member (4 Bytes each):

Assuming that we have an instance of class C somewhere in memory at address X , we know that its member a which it inherited from struct A lies at exactly the same offset. Member b is located at X + 4 , and c is located at X + 8 .

If we are just interested in one of those specific members, we could simply calculate the offset, and then reinterpret_cast , just like this:

Let’s assume we have some code, which relies on getting addresses of struct A typed addresses in integral form:

That’s no good style, but this program works. The structures have standard definitions which initialize members a , b , and c to values 0xa , 0xb , and 0xc .

The program will print a at run time, which is what we expect.

The inheritance chain wraps every inheriting member’s variables past the structure members in memory from which it is inheriting. So the memory layout of c looks like:

|Relative offset|Value|Structure Type Origin| |0x0|0xa|A| |0x4|0xb|B| |0x8|0xc|C|

(Every table row represents an integer in memory)

This program stops to work so nicely when changing the inheritance chain a bit:

This program version will print f , and not a . This is, because we disturbed the memory layout by letting C first inherit from Foo , then from B (which still inherits from A ).

|Relative offset|Value|Structure Type Origin| |0x0|0xf|Foo| |0x4|0xa|A| |0x8|0xb|B| |0xc|0xc|C|

reinterpret_cast is just not the right tool for this, if we just assume that inheriting from A somehow shall do the magic. Before showing how to do it right, i first present another failing example:

In this case, the program might print a , but in many cases it will print something.

The only difference is, that we added a virtual function in struct C . This leads to this object containing another pointer. It points to a vtable. (That vtable itself is globally accessible at runtime and contains pointers to all virtual functions which that class contains. This is roughly how C++ implements polymorphy.) The vtable pointer can be located somewhere in the object. In the clang and GCC case, it is located at the beginning of the object, where we assumed the a member. And that is why it does not work.

Casting done right

I renamed the 3 variants of struct C to C1 , C2 , and C3 . This program will now correctly print a in all these cases.

What is different here (But same in all cases!), is that the address of the objects are first static_cast ed to const A* , and then reinterpret_cast ed to std::uintptr_t .

static_cast applies some magic to the pointer: As it knows from what to what we are casting (from type C to A ), it can modify the actual pointer address. And it must do that, because if we want an A -typed pointer from the C2 object (which first inherits from Foo , and then from B ), then we must add 4 bytes to the address, in order to have an actual A pointer. (Because the A part lies 4 bytes behind the Foo part)

In the C3 case (which adds a virtual function), the pointer must be fixed in the sense that the A part of the object lies behind (or in front of? That is compiler dependend, but static_cast will always get it right!) the vtable. So in this case, clang’s static_cast will add 8 bytes offset to the pointer, to make it an actual A typed pointer. (It’s 8 bytes, because a pointer is 8 bytes large on 64bit systems which we assume here)

Another nice feature is, that static_cast will refuse to compile, if the object is by no means related to type A . reinterpret_cast just ignores this and gives us no safety.

However, it was not possible to completely avoid reinterpret_cast , because of the type erasing cast from A* to std::uintptr_t , which static_cast would refuse to do. Although we could have used a union which overlays an A pointer with a std::uintptr_t .

Summary

Only use reinterpret_cast when you are 1000000% sure what type you have in front of you. And even if you could do the math of pointer offset correction yourself - don’t.

When casting, you should always first consider to static_cast to the type you need first. This will fail if you got the types wrong - this is useful in situations where you deal with templates or auto types) Do the reinterpret_cast only if it is really inevitable, and even then double check its correctness.

reinterpret_cast - static_cast chains will not make your code prettier. As Stroustrup states in his original C++ books, the C++ style casts are intentionally ugly, because they are also potentionally dangerous.