I am a PhD student and am working at classification of code fragments on a binary level. For that, I used the Intel compiler to compile several open source projects. While analyzing the code, I stumbled upon an interesting code snippet I cannot find another explanation than a potential bug.
It resides inside the function exp_J, which is called by exp. The disassembled code is a bit lengthy, so I will only highlight the main point of interest. There is one basic block that has an in-degree of zero. This should only happen on very specific occasions, such as exception handling. The respective code is
cmp ecx, 80000000h <-- this basic block is never executed jb short loc_80A0CD2 cmp ecx, 0C086232Bh jb loc_80A0DCB ja short loc_80A0CD9 mov edx, [esp+80h] cmp edx, 0FEFA39EFh jb loc_80A0DCB jmp short loc_80A0CD9
I would be happy for any response regarding this matter.