On Mar 9, 2008, at 7:13 PM, Wayne Davison wrote:
I'm curious why the xmalloc() function (and its brethren) exits with a
fatal error on only some systems and not on all systems? I would
think
that the code should use the exiting functions in all cases, and just
provide differing versions of xstrdup() so that the HAVE_MCHECK_H
version does a malloc() (rather than strdup() doing it).
xmalloc() et al is mostly a fetish of mine.
I personally believe that its silly wasting time checking _ALL_
code paths for malloc failures. 99.999% of the time returning
an error rather than aborting is pointless anyways (imho).
If I'm not off track, you can apply the attached patch to implement
this.
There are some subtleties however with xstrdup. If strdup(3), rather
than
what I use with rpm
#define xstrdup(_str) (strcpy((malloc(strlen(_str)+1) ? :
vmefail(strlen(_str)+1)), (_str)))
is done, then line numbers reported by glibc mtrace(3) will be wrto
strdup,
not the caller of strdup.
All that stops me from using everywhere is the GNU extension that is
needed by
xstrdup so that the xstrdup macro is mostly side-effect free (I don't
care so
much that the (_str) macro argument is used several times on the
error paths,
its used only once on the success paths.
And sure a static inline function avoids all the side-effects, but
static inline functions
were unknown to me last century when the hackery was first devised.
valgrind
dinna exist, and Rational Purify cost the Very Big $$$ back then too ...
73 de Jeff
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