Has anyone ever seen this before?

[Wolf`]

I know most posts are asking why something doesn't work, but in this case, it shouldn't but does. This uses an array as a function and executes it without a problem. Does anyone know why?

char code[3] = 
{
	"\x90"		//nop
	"\xC3"		//ret
};

int main () 
{

	void (*funct)() = (void (__cdecl *)(void))(void*) &code;
	funct();
}

[DeadPlanet]

There isn't really any reason for it not to work. Calls the address of 'code' which has two instructions.

When a function call is executed the return address is pushed onto the stack and when ret is used it is popped and jumped to.

[cas]

Because you're asking the compiler to do it.

You're going outside of the C standard when you convert from a pointer to an array to a function. Your compiler, apparently, does something "useful" here.

C is often called a portable assembler, and not without some merit. C does have a type system, but you can get around it pretty easily. A function pointer is supposed to point to a function, but as you can see, you can circumvent that. If the bytes at the location the function pointer points to look like a function, why wouldn't it act like a function call?

There's no guarantee that this will work--but on some systems, there's really no difference between a function and an array of bytes that happen to look like that function.

[Elysia]

Likely on modern OS, it will not work because it's stored in a non-executable code segment.
But there is nothing stopping you from allocating some memory, filling it with some code and marking it as executable. Then it would definitely work.

[dwks]

The array contains the machine code for a simple function that does nothing. (Well, a hexadecimal ASCII representation of the machine code.) Normally functions are created by the compiler and put into read-only portions of the memory, but you can put the actual data anywhere and ask the CPU to execute it if you like.

That doesn't mean it's a good idea. It's very unportable to hard-code machine code like that, and it's not a good idea to put it into read-write memory where the code could be modified. Any antivirus program looking at that might get suspicious.