Suspicious usage of malloc

[sleeptightAnsiC]

Hi,

I've been reading the bam's source tree lately and noticed a bit strange pattern:

• result of malloc is rarely being checked, neither in the place where the call happens nor somewhere else.
• when memory needs to be zero-initialized the malloc+memset is being used instead of calloc

For example:

bam/src/statcache.c

Lines 28 to 35 in a44a2c7

	struct STATCACHE* statcache_create()
	{
	struct STATCACHE* statcache = malloc(sizeof(struct STATCACHE));
	memset(statcache, 0, sizeof(struct STATCACHE));
	statcache->heap = mem_create();
	return statcache;
	}

In this case sizeof(struct STATCACHE) is pretty big so calloc would be beneficial.
(see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2688466/why-mallocmemset-is-slower-than-calloc )
Also, in OOM situation, this will corrupt memory and cause a crash later.

Is there a reason for this? Are there any platforms that do not support calloc ?