It's just a demo to illustrate that malloc() causes a crash on Win32 (but not elsewhere, afaik). Perhaps I should have declared char * useless_and_pointless; instead of char * s;.
Now a malloc() call should have a conditional statement to see that it actually worked
Yes, if you're wanting to make use of the memory that you've requested be allocated, I think that's a good idea. For the purposes of this demo, however, I don't really care whether the malloc succeeds or fails - I just want it to not cause a crash. (Besides, on Win32, I'm not even going to see the result of that "conditional statement" because it never gets executed - due to afore-mentioned crash.)
Similarly, any memory leak is of no concern to me wrt this particular exercise.
Cheers, Rob
Comment on Re^2: [Win32] pthreads and memory allocation
Yes, Perhaps I should have declared char * useless_and_pointless; instead of char * s;.
Yes, I figure that would be correct and I figure that we understand each other.
The basic issue is: "s = (char*) malloc(100);". "s" is cast as a pointer to a memory address. "s" is guaranteed to point to at least 100 bytes (consecutive).