What if malloc fails?

Question

If a malloc allocation fails, should we try it again?

In something like this:

char* mystrdup(const char *s)  
{
    char *ab = NULL;

           


        

Answer 1

In a single-threaded program "trying again" without freeing any memory between tries make no practical sense. It will just loop forever.

In a multi-threaded program this might "work", if another thread running in parallel suddenly decides to free some of its own memory. The loop in such case would constitute a classic "busy waiting" loop. But even in this case such code has very little practical value for more reasons than one.