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.