Needless pointer-casts in C

Question

I got a comment to my answer on this thread:

Malloc inside a function call appears to be getting freed on return?

In short I had code like this:

Answer 1

The "forgot stdlib.h" argument is a straw man. Modern compilers will detect and warn of the problem (gcc -Wall).

You should always cast the result of malloc immediately. Not doing so should be considered an error, and not just because it will fail as C++. If you're targeting a machine architecture with different kinds of pointers, for example, you could wind up with a very tricky bug if you don't put in the cast.

Edit: The commentor Evan Teran is correct. My mistake was thinking that the compiler didn't have to do any work on a void pointer in any context. I freak when I think of FAR pointer bugs, so my intuition is to cast everything. Thanks Evan!