ranger_danger • yesterday at 7:41 PM

In C, assigning the return value from malloc() to a specific type merely produces a warning:

  $ echo -ne "#include <stdlib.h>\nint foo() { return malloc(42); }" | gcc -xc -fsyntax-only -c -
  <stdin>: In function ‘foo’:
  <stdin>:2:20: warning: returning ‘void *’ from a function with return type ‘int’ makes integer from pointer without a cast [-Wint-conversion]

Whereas in C++ it's a hard error:

  $ echo -ne "#include <stdlib.h>\nint foo() { return malloc(42); }" | gcc -xc++ -fsyntax-only -c -
  <stdin>: In function ‘int foo()’:
  <stdin>:2:26: error: invalid conversion from ‘void*’ to ‘int’ [-fpermissive]

Does this not count as "more type safe" to you?