> and casting back is not guaranteed to do anything useful I believe it's implementation-specific, precisely so that malloc/free can be implemented in conforma

> and casting back is not guaranteed to do anything useful I believe it's implementation-specific, precisely so that malloc/free can be implemented in conformant C. The only tricky part is how you can "bless" parts of large memory block originally pointed to by void* (returned from mmap(), for example) to safely become ints and char[]s and structs...