On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 10:38:28AM +0200, Oskar Liljeblad wrote: > He *was* compiling it using g++. Is there a GNU coding standard > statement for 'void *' casts?
No, http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html says nothing on this subject. While some code in there does show a cast to char* for the return value of malloc(), that could just as easily be a hangover from the days when the system headers didn't always include a declaration. > If you look in the libc documentation you'll find casts for malloc > in some places, some places not. My strong recommendation would be that for C code casts from void* should be avoided. The problem is that every time you make a cast to (foo*) from some other type, you have set a trap for someone. In five years when someone modifies the function that is being called to return some type not compatible with (foo*), the compiler will not be able to warn of the problem because the explicit cast silences the warning. I much prefer software which is constructed in such a way as to allow the compiler to help the programmer eliminate bugs. Not having the cast will cause a problem for C++. For such cases if a lot of use of C++ is planned, it may be worthwhile to consider a wrapper function: static char* getbuffer(size_t siz) { #ifdef __cplusplus return new char[siz]; // or return (char*)malloc(siz); #else return malloc(siz); #endif } static char* discardbuffer(char *buf) { #ifdef __cplusplus delete[] buf;; // or free(buf); #else free(buf); #endif } Regards, James. _______________________________________________ bug-gnulib mailing list bug-gnulib@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnulib
