From: Mike Stump <mikest...@comcast.net> Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:19:10 -0700
> If Android is safe in this respect, then, they can just turn it on, > and then force anyone porting software to their platform to `fix' > their code. They'd have to then know to turn this option off when building the kernel, which does use such constructs extensively. I think this whole idea has too many downsides to be considered seriously. People write problems like this, lots of people. It's a pervasive technique to encode boolean state into the low bits of a pointer or to represent special "token" pointers using integers such as "-1".
