Function Pointers and Regular Pointers

Introduction

There are a lot of similarities between function pointers and pointers to variables. However, function pointers have a few particularities, which we’ll now discuss.

Function pointers are read-only

Function pointers point inside the .text section, which should get mapped in a read-only memory area. As stated previously, it helps protect against code injection attacks. Moreover, it wouldn’t make sense to write to a function pointer. We would be effectively changing the program’s code while it’s running.

Let’s try to create a function pointer, write to it and see what happens.