Re: [Help-gsl] Re: free

[John D Lamb]

Brian Gough wrote:
> Jochen Küpper writes:
>  > > I checked the source code for gsl_matrix_free and it will fail if passed
>  > > a null pointer.
>  > 
>  > Shouldn't the GSL free-routines be changed like the following patch?
>
> My thinking on that was that for most people calling the free()
> functions on a null pointer is usually an error rather than by design,
> so it's helpful to get a segmentation fault.  
>
> In general, I've never been convinced that free'ing a null pointer is
> particularly useful as opposed to just doing "if (p) free(p)" in the
> application.
A check in the _free codes would also add a small overhead. I think
there's an arguable case for a delete() function that checks for a null
pointer. But GSL is a C library, not a C++ library and there's no new()
function to go along with it, which ought to can throw a bad_alloc
exception, not available in C.

In any case there's no difficulty to write your own inline new() and
delete() functions as needed.

-- 
JDL