The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen@iki.fi>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] About the history of cfree()
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 17:39:20 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200624143920.GA8127@sartre> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <98DC6210-A6ED-4E51-8EF8-085CB553D966@planet.nl>

Hello,

does anyone remember details on how the cfree() function ended to <stdlib.h>
of various systems? 

From the only available documentation I could easily find [1], I'd reckon it
came from SCO's malloc implementation that tried to conform to Intel's i386
iBCS. But almost all other systems wrapped it to free().  Interestingly, it
seems that also SunOS 4.0 (1988) used the free()-wrapper.  So was the
3-parameter cfree() only used in SCO XENIX 386 (1987) and the like [2]?

Anyways, a small but interesting detail, and I suppose a good example on the
developments that led to ANSI C.

- Jukka

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/cfree.3.html
[2] https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/unix/scohistory.html

      parent reply	other threads:[~2020-06-24 14:39 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-03-16 12:31 [TUHS] Unix 8th / 9th edition IPC paper Paul Ruizendaal
2020-03-16 13:09 ` Chet Ramey
     [not found]   ` <CAC20D2MDKAsZLCkZzZTC7EOQv-3=xDCOH4G6-eZNcGR=gNtkrA@mail.gmail.com>
2020-03-16 14:40     ` Clem Cole
2020-06-24 14:39 ` Jukka Ruohonen [this message]

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=20200624143920.GA8127@sartre \
    --to=jruohonen@iki.fi \
    --cc=tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).