David King writes: > On-topic from <http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=612606>: > > I'm interested in audio, so I'm looking over the (frankly horrible) > documentation for this new "Pulse Audio" thing, and I see this > function in its shared lib: > > pa_xmalloc() > Allocates the specified number of bytes, just like malloc() does. > However, in case of OOM, terminate. > > First of all, why are so many programmers who write a Linux shared > library offering a simple wrapper function around malloc? Is it too > hard for an app to just call malloc? Is anyone so completely absent- > minded that he can't remember malloc is used to allocate memory, so > he needs an equivalent wrapper in every shared lib he uses?
The system version of malloc() is often Not Elite Enough for your enlightened library authors -- q.v. glib, which apparently wants to use its own allocator for some pretty sketchy reasons. Alternatively, the system allocator(s) is/are Too Damn Broken to work reliably in the various permutations of DLL Hell -- q.v. Windows -- and calling free() on a pointer that another DLL malloc()'ed can crash your application or silently corrupt the heap. (I wish I were joking about this.) That all depends on how portable you want your library API to be, but I agree on the folly of exporting a function that terminates the application on failure. Michael Poole
