Memory allocation problem in HashTable

Question

Please don\'t close this saying a duplicate question. I made an important change so not to confuse people, I resubmitted this much clearer codes.

Answer 1

One nice idiom that you can use as well is eg:

hash = (HashTablePtr) malloc(sizeof(*hash));

By not hard-coding any types in the allocation, the possibility of mixing things up is greatly reduced.

Note that 'hash' is not actually dereferenced here - sizeof() is always evaluated at compile time, so the compiler just figures out what type *hash /would/ have, and gets the size of that.