On 01/30/2014 10:34 AM, Jed Brown wrote:
Brad Aagaard <[email protected]> writes:
Matt and Jed,
I see that Jed pushed some changes (jed/malloc-zero) for PetscMalloc to
deal with memory alignment and a zero size. It looks like the pointer
will NOT be NULL for a size of 0. Is this true?
Yes, just like malloc(), it can be either a unique pointer or NULL. You
need the size anyway to know how many elements are in the array.
I thought it was a nice feature that PETSc improved on malloc() and
free() by returning NULL for zero sized allocation (although this wasn't
true for --with-debugging=0 due to memory alignment) and set pointers to
NULL after freeing.
What is the rationale for not returning NULL for mallocs of size zero
other than conforming to C malloc behavior?
Brad
