Re: Return value of malloc(0)

Pat Lashley <patl+freebsd@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Thu, Jun 29, 2006 at 11:44:23AM -0400, Pat Lashley wrote:
No, our implementation is NOT legal. We always return the SAME value. To
be legal, we should not return that value again unless it has been
free()-ed.

It is legal due to brain damaged definition of implementation defined
behaviour, but it violates the spirit of the standard :-)

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the 'implementation defined behavior'
choices in the standard. I thought that it could either 1) Return
NULL; or 2) Behave as though it returned a 'minimum allocation' (which
cannot be legally de-referenced).

I went wandering through the C Working Group archives for the heck of
it, and apparently a lot of people were confused over this, thinking
either as you did or that "unique" meant it would a value unique to
the usage of malloc(0). It's been clarified recently (and will be in
the next revision of the standard) to the meaning you understood.

Specifically:

If the size of the space requested is zero, the behavior is
implementation-defined: either a null pointer is returned, or the
behavior is as if the size were some nonzero value, except that
the returned pointer shall not be used to access an object.

But if it did actually perform a
minimum allocation'; wouldn't it have to return a different value
every time to maintain the free() semantics?

I think that's another way of looking at the same confusion. If
"minimum" is zero, then using a sentinel value (as in FreeBSD) works.

Our malloc() could be easily fixed to be standards-compliant by
removing the special handling for ZEROSIZEPTR in malloc.c; then
allocations of 0 bytes will be rounded up to 16, just like all other
alloations of less than 16 bytes. However, that would lose much of
the bug-finding advantage of the current behaviour.

This is wandering into -standards territory, though. In any case, the
answer to thread's original question is "mozilla should fix its code
to not assume malloc(0)==NULL".
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