Some functions are in the hot path of a sort. While it is more
correct to also use assert() here for the passed pointers it is
also a runtime cost that should never be needed when e.g. qsort()
is used as it will always pass non-NULL pointers.
So for these critical functions use POINTER_MAY_BE_NULL() which
is compiled out and add a comment to them. Not all _compare()
functions are changed, it was a bit of a judgement call because
some (like ether_addr_compare) are not called with that much data.
But happy to get advise here and tweak accordingly.
Add the needed assert changes to make the code clean
for the new check-pointer-deref script.
Note that for `_cmp()` functions its a bit of a question
if we want `assert()` or `POINTER_MAY_BE_NULL()` here. The
former is more correct but it adds a (small) runtime hit. If
we use POINTER_MAY_BE_NULL() it is compiled out but strictly
speaking it is wrong (so at least we would need a comment).
Latest glibc uses _Generic to have strstr() and other functions return
const char* or char* based on whether the input is a const char* or a
char*. This causes build failures as we previously always expected a char*.
Let's fix the compilation failures and add our own macros similar to glibc's
to have string functions that return a mutable or const pointer depending on
the input.
Michael Vogt
Daan De Meyer
Lennart Poettering
Yu Watanabe
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek