Because checking for this case actually makes the logic in every piece of code more difficult, since you now have to account for the edge case. This is superflu

Because checking for this case actually makes the logic in every piece of code more difficult, since you now have to account for the edge case. This is superfluous, because in the edge case nothing bad was going to happen, anyway; a correct program wouldn't ever dereference the return value, and an incorrect program is incorrect regardless of the behavior of malloc here.