Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Michael Abbott <[email protected]> · Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:17:49 +0000 (GMT)

Of course this means that callocMustSucceed and mallocMustSucceed can
return a NULL pointer, which they currently never do.....

That's the dilemma. I thought about that but I believe requesting
zero-sized memory and subsequent de-referencing the return value can be
considered a programming error. Otherwise, I can't see how to avoid a
memory leak.

Makes sense to me.  After all, what can you legally do with
	char * x = malloc(0);
?
1.  Dereference by an offset with non-negative value strictly less than 0
or
2.  Pass it to free().
Both of these operations are completely safe with x==NULL and have the
desired effect.
After all, there is a shortage of integers i satisfying the precondition

0 <= i && i < 0

and these are the only ones it's legal to use in the expression

*(x+i)

so it's completely safe to put x equal to NULL. (Unless the code's
seriously broken already.)

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System