free(3) const void *

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Andreas,

On Fri, Jan 26, 2024 at 04:13:55PM +0100, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> On Jan 26 2024, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> 
> > It is sometimes (often?) useful to allocate some object, write
> > immediately to it, and then use it read-only.  The standard definition
> > of free() forces the programmer to keep a non-const pointer around just
> > for the sake of freeing, which is unnecessarily dangerous.
> 
> It is even more dangerous to pretend that the contents are unmodified,
> when in fact they are no longer accessible (the memory can be reused any
> time in any way).

But that's why [[gnu::malloc(deallocator)]] exists, to helps determine
the lifetime of an object (although it's imperfect, since it doesn't
take into account reallocations).

Have a lovely day,
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
Looking for a remote C programming job at the moment.
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