I've stumbled upon a problem of memory allocation. I am writing a simple application that is supposed to read files and get information from them. It is supposed to be very simple (single threaded) so I was wondering what should I do if malloc() or calloc() fails?
Should the function exit() the program with some error message or return NULL(or other appropriate return value) and try to allocate memory again?
CodePudding user response：
If malloc fails you basically have 3 options:
- free some memory and try again.
- don't allocate and do something else instead.
- exit the program.
assuming you needed the memory to store some data then 2 wouldn't be an option, and in that case you either do 1 or 3.
No one can predict all possible programs, but one reason I could see trying to allocate but not using memory was in a program where you were just testing to see how much you could allocate on a system under a given load.
Anyway I think 1 or 3 are probably most cases.