There are times when it may be desirable to obtain information about a particular heap buffer or print a diagnostic or warning message related to that heap buffer. This is particularly true when the program has its own routines providing memory manipulation and you wish to provide bounds checking. This can also be useful for adding additional bounds checking to a program to isolate a problem such as a buffer overrun or underrun that isn't associated with a call to a memory or string function.
In the latter case, rather than keeping a pointer and performing direct manipulations on the pointer, the program may define a pointer type that contains all relevant information about the pointer, including the current value, the base pointer, and the extent of the buffer. Access to the pointer can then be controlled through macros or access functions. The access functions can perform the necessary bounds checks and print a warning message in response to attempts to exceed the bounds.
Any attempt to dereference the current pointer value can be checked against the boundaries obtained when the pointer was initialized. If the boundary is exceeded, you should call the malloc_warning() function to print a diagnostic message and perform error handling. The prototype is:
void malloc_warning( const char *funcname,
const char *file,
int line,
const void *link );