Rian Hunter wrote:
This patch looks good but I have some questions. You seem to use the
returned pointers from apr_array_push without checking if they are
NULL. Even in apr_array_push, apr_palloc is used without checking for
NULL even though apr_palloc can definitely return NULL.
Because of that, I'm not sure whether or not you don't check for NULL
on purpose. Could you explain? Thanks.
Well, it depends on what your general attitude towards checking for
errors in memory allocation. In many projects it's generally considered
to be the kind of error you can't effectively recover from anyway, so
cluttering up the code with if (foo == NULL) checks is kind of
pointless, you're likely to have been killed by a kernel OOM checker
before that can do anything useful, or you could be on an OS that
doesn't even return NULL (memory overcommit), so the checks are
pointless anyway. The only way to be safe is to make sure that
algorithmicly your program can't allocate unbounded amounts of memory,
then tune your box and app so that this kind of problem doesn't happen
in practice.
APR generally doesn't bother checking for this kind of error for just
this reason, same with Subversion and if I'm not mistaken Apache HTTPD
itself.
-garrett
- Re: [PATCH] use arrays in smtpd_request_rec (was Re: smtpd_... Garrett Rooney
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