Re: [PATCH] Remove useless if-before-free tests.

"David Symonds" [off-list ref] wrote:

On Feb 17, 2008 1:58 PM, Jim Meyering [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

This change removes all useless if-before-free tests.
E.g., it replace code like this

        if (some_expression)
                free (some_expression);

with the now-equivalent

        free (some_expression);

It is equivalent not just because POSIX has required free(NULL)
to work for a long time, but simply because it has worked for
so long that no reasonable porting target fails the test.
Here's some evidence from nearly 1.5 years ago:

    http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patches/2006-October/031544.html

That's not great evidence. It only tests 9 systems, and misses several

If you mean mingw, cygwin, and M$-based ones, they're all ok.
As far as I know, you have to go back to SunOS4 to find a system on which
free(NULL) fails.  That OS stopped being a reasonable porting target
a couple years ago.

targets that Git already runs on. It seems like a fairly minor cleanup
for a definite loss of portability.

It's a definite loss of portability if you can find a reasonable porting
target for which free(NULL) fails.  But even if you do, the fix is
not to reject the clean-up, but to amend it with a wrapper function.
That encapsulates the work-around in one place rather than polluting
all of those files.