[mpich-discuss] Mpich failing electric-fence check

[Jed Brown]

Matthieu Dorier <matthieu.dorier at irisa.fr> writes:
> ElectricFence Aborting: Allocating 0 bytes, probably a bug. 

I would argue that ElectricFence is wrong here.  The standard guarantees
that malloc(0) succeeds and it is useful to simplify code and to test
for matching free in cases where a positive size is rare.

C99 §7.20.3: If the size of the space requested is zero, the behavior is implementation-
defined: either a null pointer is returned, or the behavior is as if the size were some
nonzero value, except that the returned pointer shall not be used to access an object.

Either way, the returned pointer can be passed to free.  Are you aware
of current malloc implementations which violate the above?
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