Re: So You Think You Can Const?

On 1/10/25 13:56, Keith Thompson wrote:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:
[...]

If you want a better signature for "free", then I would suggest "void
free(void ** p)" - that (to me) more naturally shows that the function
is freeing the pointer, while also greatly reducing the "use after
free" errors in C code by turning them into "dereferencing a null
pointer" errors which are more easily caught by many OS's.

>
I'm not sure that would work. A void** argument means you need to pass
a pointer to a void* object. If you've assigned the converted result of
malloc() to, say, an int* object, you don't have a void* object. (int*
and void* might not even have the same representation).

Correct. As a result, that interface would, in principle, require
storing the pointer in a void* object so that it's address could be
passed to free(). In many contexts, that would encourage saving the
original void* value returned by malloc() for passing to free(), while
creating a second pointer for actually using the allocated memory.