What wording in the C++ standard allows static_cast<non-void-type*>(malloc(N)); to work?
- by ben
As far as I understand the wording in 5.2.9 Static cast, the only time the result of a void*-to-object-pointer conversion is allowed is when the void* was a result of the inverse conversion in the first place.
Throughout the standard there is a bunch of references to the representation of a pointer, and the representation of a void pointer being the same as that of a char pointer, and so on, but it never seems to explicitly say that casting an arbitrary void pointer yields a pointer to the same location in memory, with a different type, much like type-punning is undefined where not punning back to an object's actual type.
So while malloc clearly returns the address of suitable memory and so on, there does not seem to be any way to actually make use of it, portably, as far as I have seen.
