Thread: Passing by reference of by value?

but if malloc were to allocate memory at an address that is to big for the pointer in question to hold then you'd get very weird results

C standard to the rescue again! From 7.20.3p1:

The pointer returned if the allocation succeeds is suitably aligned so that it may be assigned to a pointer to any type of object and then used to access such an object or an array of such objects in the space allocated

This forces malloc() to return acceptable values.

Hmm, so that would mean that the size of the pointer returned from malloc is the size of the smallest type of pointer on said system?

Hmm, so that would mean that the size of the pointer returned from malloc is the size of the smallest type of pointer on said system?

It all depends on how many of the bits of a pointer are used to actually store relevant data. I would expect the opposite, though: since any pointer type has to be convertible to void* and back, having void* be at least as large as the largest pointer would facilitate this. malloc() would simply have to know to return values within the range of the smallest pointer type.

Of course, if one assumes that all pointer values would fit into the smallest pointer type, then void* surely could be the smallest type, and the extra space in larger pointers would simply be unused. This would be a fairly ridiculous system, but not disallowed as far as I can tell.

Realistically you can expect all pointers to be the same size, and probably the same representation. If they're not, the implementation must ensure that the guarantees of the standard are upheld. As mentioned in the C FAQ, the real difference tends to be how char* (and thus void*) is represented versus other pointer types. But even if they're the same size, the different representation would have caused problems for the original code: it assumed void* was the same as a struct pointer.