My understanding is that fontconfig API returns NULL only on allocation failures. So, I think you've hit a bug. <div class="gmail_extra"> <div class="gmail_quote">On Aug 25, 2016 1:19 PM, "Alan Coopersmith" <<a href="mailto:alan.coopersmith@oracle.com">alan.coopersmith@oracle.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">While assisting with the investigation of: [JDK-8160664] JVM crashed with font manager on Solaris 12 <a href="https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8160664" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8160664</a> we discovered that if none of the font directories are present on the system FcFontList() returns NULL, but if at least one is present, even if empty, then it returns a valid pointer to a list of 0 entries. This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere that I can find, but you can see the fc-list utility checks for it all the way back to the first revision in git. Is this intentional? Should it be documented so other application authors know to check for NULL? -- -Alan Coopersmith- <a href="mailto:alan.coopersmith@oracle.com" target="_blank">alan.coopersmith@oracle.com</a> Oracle Solaris Engineering - <a href="http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc</a> _______________________________________________ Fontconfig mailing list <a href="mailto:Fontconfig@lists.freedesktop.org" target="_blank">Fontconfig@lists.freedesktop.org</a> <a href="https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/fontconfig" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/fontconfig</a> </blockquote></div></div>