Testing for an invalid windows handle: should I compare with 'NULL', '0' or even 'nullptr'?

I'm coming from a background whereby pointers should generally be compared with 'NULL' and integers with '0'.

S开发者_StackOverflowince I didn't perceive Windows handles to be 'pointers' in the pure sense (being 'handles'), I'd got into the habit of comparing them with 0 rather than 'NULL'.

Clearly they're implemented internally as pointers nowadays, but I personally consider that to be merely for acquiring some type-safety rather than because they are intrinsically pointers.

Anyway, I just noticed that the help for CreateIC which returns an HDC states that if the function fails then it returns 'NULL'.

Now I'm confused - and am wondering what other people reckon - is it more correct to consider a Windows handle to be a pointer (and therefore check it against 'NULL' or 'nullptr' for modern compilers) or should it be considered to be an integer?

Compare it against the documented error return value. That means that you should compare it against INVALID_HANDLE, 0, -1, non-zero, or <=32 (I'm not kidding with the last one, see ShellExecute).

To answer your question: the HANDLE type is declared in winnt.h as

typedef PVOID HANDLE;

Hence, technically it is a pointer.

However, I would just use whatever is documented; if the documentation states that NULL is returned, I use exactly that unless evidence shows that the documentation is incorrect.

I don't even think about pointers vs. integers. NULL is just an opaque value (in this situation) and HANDLE is an opaque type to me and I don't bother looking up what it is #define'd to.

I think INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE is usually the proper 'invalid' value for windows handles...and that evaluates to -1.