Re: NULL pointer in overloaded operator delete []

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:53:32 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<34584fa5-9e3d-4e1d-a134-f7af52dc271f@o4g2000pra.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 13, 2:50 pm, Victor Bazarov <v.Abaza...@comAcast.net> wrote:

Rahul wrote:

Please read the following code

class Test{
public:
        void * operator new [] (size_t t)
        { return malloc(t); }

        void operator delete [] (void *p)
        { free(p); }
};

void main () {

Test *p= 0;

delete [] p;

/* What should happen here, Should the call go inside Test::operator
delete []. Because what I learned from books is that deleting a NULL
pointer is safe (calling ::operator delete[] on a NULL pointer does
not crash). But here it causes a crash on Sun CC because it gets
inside Test::operator delete [] whereas on VC++ and g++ it doesn't.

        Should I put a check in Test::operator delete [] for "p=

!

=NULL"? Is Sun CC behaving as per the C++ standard?


The behaviour of your program is undefined. 'main' must
return the type 'int':


Not undefined. It's an error which requires a diagnosis.

Of course, that is completely orthogonal to his question.

    int main() {

Seriously, though, everything should be OK because 'free' is
explicitly specified as a NOP if its argument is a null
pointer.

You need to investigate further why on Sun it doesn't go into
the overloaded operator delete[]. And even if you don't
overload, the deletion (using 'delete' or 'delete[]') is
explicitly defined as OK if the argument is a null pointer.


It's still the responisiblity of operator delete (or delete[])
to check; the standard doesn't guarantee that it won't be given
a null pointer; the standard requires that it be a no-op if
given a null pointer.

But of course, all he's doing is calling free() with the pointer,
and free() is guaranteed to be a no-op when given a null
pointer, so his implementation meets the requirements.

--
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