alt Hacker NewsThere are functions on many C allocators that are explicitly for non-trivial allocation scenarios, but what major operating system malloc implementation returns NULL? MSVC’s docs reserve the right to return NULL, but the actual code is not capable of doing so (because it would be a security nightmare).
Replies
qhwudbebd • yesterday at 8:18 AM
I hack on various C projects on a linux/musl box, and I'm pretty sure I've seen musl's malloc() return 0, although possibly the only cases where I've triggered that fall into the 'unreasonably huge' category, where a typo made my enormous request fail some sanity check before even trying to allocate.
> There are functions on many C allocators that are explicitly for non-trivial allocation scenarios, but what major operating system malloc implementation returns NULL?
Solaris (and FreeBSD?) have overcommitting disabled by default.