Should we check if memory allocations fail?

Question

I\'ve seen a lot of code that checks for NULL pointers whenever an allocation is made. This makes the code verbose, and if it\'s not done consistently, only when the program

Answer 1

Similar to Dave's approach above, but adds a macro that automatically passes the file name and line number to our allocation routine so that we can report that information in the event of a failure.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#define ZMALLOC(theSize) zmalloc(__FILE__, __LINE__, theSize)

static void *zmalloc(const char *file, int line, int size)
{
   void *ptr = malloc(size);

   if(!ptr)
   {
      printf("Could not allocate: %d bytes (%s:%d)\n", size, file, line);
      exit(1);
   }

   return(ptr);
}

int main()
{
   /* -- Set 'forceFailure' to a non-zero value in order to observe
         how 'zmalloc' behaves when it cannot allocate the
         requested memory -- */

   int bytes        = 10 * sizeof(int);
   int forceFailure = 0;
   int *anArray     = NULL;

   if(forceFailure)
      bytes = -1;

   anArray = ZMALLOC(bytes);

   free(anArray);

   return(0);
}