Creating a function to check if malloc succeeded

Question

So I am doing a small project which involves using the malloc, realloc and calloc functions from time to time. I understood that after every allocation I should be checking if it failed and it points to null like so:

int* arr = malloc(size*sizeof(int));

if (!arr)
{
      printf("ERROR! Not enough memory!\n");
      exit(1); // to exit the program immedietly.
}

and I was wondering if it is okay to create a method that will do just that for every kind of pointer like so:

void checkOutOfMemory(const void* p) //gets a pointer and exit program if points to null.
{
    if (!p)
    {
        printf("ERROR! Out of memory!\n");
        exit(1);
    }
}

I mean, it works so far, but I started wondering if there are any special cases I didn't know about.

Answer 1

This is a good way to perform this kind of check. It prevents the error checking code from being duplicated in numerous places. You should however use perror which will include a textual description of why malloc failed.

You could go one step further and perform the allocation and check at once:

void *safe_malloc(size_t size)
{
    void *ptr = malloc(size);

    if (!ptr && (size > 0)) {
      perror("malloc failed!");
      exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
    }

    return ptr;
}

Since malloc can return NULL on success if the given size is 0, you need to check for that as well.

You can then create similar functions for realloc and calloc.