On 5/15/15 11:37 AM, deadalnix wrote:
On Friday, 15 May 2015 at 16:36:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
This is a matter with some history behind it. In C, malloc(0) always
returns a new, legit pointer that can be subsequently reallocated,
freed etc. What most malloc() implementations practically do in their
first line is:
if (size == 0) size = 1;
and take it from there.
There are actually 2 way to do this in malloc. Either you return null,
but then you need to be able to accept null in the free implementation
(as malloc must return a freeable pointer) or you just bump to 1.
Both are valid per spec and there are implementations of malloc for both.
Ah, nice. I was under the misconception that malloc(0) cannot return
null in C. Apparently it's implementation defined at least since C99,
see http://stackoverflow.com/a/2132318/348571. Thanks!
Andrei
