Freeandnull

Freeandnull is used as a term in software engineering contexts to describe a memory-management discipline that pairs memory release with the nulling of the pointer. The central idea is to reduce the likelihood of dereferencing freed memory by ensuring that any pointer that no longer refers to valid memory is set to null. This practice is discussed in tips and patterns for languages with manual or semi-manual memory management, notably C and C++; it is often presented in examples as a simple defensive measure against use-after-free errors.

Beyond its technical meaning, freeandnull is also encountered as an online handle or alias used by developers in forums, code repositories, or technical blogs. In such contexts, the term may appear in project names, comments, or macro identifiers. However, there is no single canonical project or organization universally associated with the term.

Usage considerations include the fact that setting a pointer to null after free does not prevent all memory-management bugs and can lead to other issues such as double frees if the NULL assignment is missing or not properly maintained. The technique is one of several memory-safety practices, alongside smart pointers, memory pools, and defensive programming strategies.

See also malloc, free, NULL, use-after-free, memory management, defensive programming.