> > As long as the marked definition still satisfies the assumptions > GCC makes about the function it won't be harmful. I don't know > all the nuances of pointer aliasing in GCC that might rely on it > but assuming they faithfully reflect the standard requirements > it will be safe. > > The other aspect of the question is under what the conditions > is suggesting the attribute meaningful. Without spending too > much time on it, I think the condition should be that the > function must return a pointer obtained from a call to > an allocation function that depends on one or more of its > arguments, either directly or indirectly, or NULL. Does that > make sense or can you or someone think of some realistic use > cases where this would be too broad?
I also think marking functions returning NULL as malloc should be OK correctness wise. I would not require the call to alloc function to depend on argument of the caller - it seems perfectly OK to me to just call malloc with constant argument, for instance. Honza > > Martin
