Yes. I believe zero sized types should be possible and they should all have the same address. Trying to deref the pointer is UB right away because you do not have the byte under that pointer. As it is, the malloc implementation now needs special casing for 0 sized allocations and different implementations special case it differently. C is supposed to be low level so surface this confusion up. Let the programmer decide if they want a unique address and reserve a byte or a non unique one with no overhead.