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Andrew Cagney wrote:
Bernando, you've now got an interface which allows reallocating to a variable size, but not allocating to one... There's no need for a rush, let's give people some time to comment before putting this into libiberty. As DJ says, it's hard to take things out of libiberty.
I guess daniel had this in mind:
/* Utility macros to allocate typed memory. Avoids errors like: struct foo *foo = xmalloc (sizeof struct bar); and memset (foo, sizeof (struct foo), 0). */ #define XZALLOC(TYPE) ((TYPE*) memset (xmalloc (sizeof (TYPE)), 0, sizeof (TYPE) )) #define XMALLOC(TYPE) ((TYPE*) xmalloc (sizeof (TYPE))) #define XCALLOC(NMEMB, TYPE) ((TYPE*) xcalloc ((NMEMB), sizeof (TYPE)))
Hmmm... What's the advantage of using XZALLOC over XCALLOC?
These macros don't address vector allocations and aren't paired with corresponding macros to release memory.
They first appeared in GDB in '99 and were added to GDB's global headerfile in '02 (and I'm sure the idea was stolen from elsewhere). Unlike the macros being proposed, these:
- use uppercase to make it very very clear that they are macros
This contraddicts the GCC addenda to the GNU coding conventions: macros meant to be used like C functions should be named like C functions. See http://gcc.gnu.org/codingconventions.html (Miscellaneous Conventions).
- are named in a way that directly reflects their C herritage
What we're trying to do is getting away from the (dangerous) C practice of allocating structures by casting around void pointers to raw memory blocks.
The libcpp macros for type-safe memory allocation resemble C++-style memory allocation, hence the new/delete names.
(Actually, C++'s new and delete would also perform construction and destruction, which we can't possibly do in C).
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