C++ new int[0] — will it allocate memory?

Question

A simple test app:

cout << new int[0] << endl;

outputs:

0x876c0b8

So it looks like it works.

Answer 1

Yes it is completely legal to allocate a 0 sized block with new. You simply can't do anything useful with it since there is no valid data for you to access. int[0] = 5; is illegal.

However, I believe that the standard allows for things like malloc(0) to return NULL.

You will still need to delete [] whatever pointer you get back from the allocation as well.