[Python-Dev] Problem with the memory docs (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
05 Apr 2002 20:21:19 +0200

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:

I'm still confused. What is the difference between calling malloc(1) and returning a non-null pointer "normally" ?

There is probably no practical difference. If you do malloc(0) and get a non-zero pointer, you cannot access any memory behind this pointer; if you invoke malloc(1), the C library must make sure that there is atleast a single byte to access. This may take larger efforts - but probably doesn't, in practice (unless your malloc implementation tries to clear the memory it allocates with a fence pattern).

Regards, Martin