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10.46.31 malloc ¶

POSIX specification:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/malloc.html

Gnulib module: malloc-posix

Portability problems fixed by Gnulib:

• On some platforms, when the function fails it does not set errno: mingw, MSVC 14.
• On some platforms, when the function fails it might set errno to EAGAIN instead of to ENOMEM. Although POSIX allows EAGAIN, the malloc-posix module insists on ENOMEM which also conforms to POSIX and is GNU-compatible: Solaris 11.4.
• On some platforms, malloc (n) can succeed even if n exceeds PTRDIFF_MAX. Although this behavior is arguably allowed by POSIX it can lead to behavior not defined by POSIX later, so malloc-posix does not allow going over the limit.

Extension: Gnulib provides a module ‘malloc-gnu’ that substitutes a malloc implementation that behaves more like the glibc implementation, by fixing this portability problem:

• malloc (0) returns NULL on success on some platforms: AIX 7.3.