Asking for a sanity check on this design choice.
I'm writing a heap sort in C by creating a heap data structure that can accept node types of string or numerical. (I'm creating my own private heap that I can sort)
The nodes in the heap are void*, which are dereferenced to perform the comparison operations. The Heap struct stores the sizeof each node in Heap.nodesize, or -1 if the node is a string.
When a node is inserted, memory is allocated for the void*. If the Heap.nodesize is -1, strlen(val) is passed to malloc, otherwise Heap.nodesize is passed to malloc.
When performing comparisons, if Heap.nodesize is -1 strcmp is used, otherwise boolean operators are used for the numerical.
When the heap is freed, I plan to loop through and free each void*. At this point will free know how many bytes to free for each node?
You don't need to know the originally malloced size. You just pass the pointer that malloc() returned to free().
ssize_t size = 400;
void* p = malloc(size);
// Do whatever with p
free(p);