Little conveniences

[Ken Raeburn]

On Oct 1, 2009, at 13:29, Paul Moore wrote:
> or even
>
> static inline void k5alloc(size_t size)
> {
> 	 return calloc(size, 1);
> }
>
> since the results is either good or ENOMEM, there not a lot of point  
> in
> returning the failure reason

I assume part of the idea was to avoid doing the ENOMEM setting  
explicitly at every call site.

I'll note, though, that a NULL return value may not mean failure, if  
the requested size was zero.  Open-coding that additional check, at  
every call site that hasn't been checked to ensure that zero couldn't  
be passed in, would also be annoying.  If zero-sized allocations are  
allowed and aren't adjusted to allocate at least one byte, then the  
caller needs to check the error code and not the pointer, in the  
general case; certainly there will be a number of calls where zero  
can't be passed.

Ken