Warning C26825

Postcondition for possibly null pointer 'variable' requires it to be non-null (lifetime.1)

Remarks

Dereferencing a null pointer is a frequent problem in C and C++. The static analysis engine includes several checks to deal with such problems. For a comparison, see this blog post. When the analysis engine determines that a function might produce a null pointer despite a SAL postcondition that requires a non-null value, it emits warning C26825. A common cause is assigning a parameter or return value without a non-null guarantee to an _Outptr_ output parameter. You can enable C26824 to report values known to be null. This check only works on functions annotated using SAL annotations.

Example

void postcondition_conditional(int *q, _Outptr_ int** p)  { 
    *p = q; // C26825 warning 
} 

To resolve this warning, ensure the annotated function returns a non-null value or outputs a non-null value on every path where the contract applies. Or, change the annotations to reflect the behavior of the function.