This change removes all obvious useless if-before-free tests.
E.g., it replaces code like this:
if (some_expression)
free (some_expression);
with the now-equivalent:
free (some_expression);
It is equivalent not just because POSIX has required free(NULL)
to work for a long time, but simply because it has worked for
so long that no reasonable porting target fails the test.
Here's some evidence from nearly 1.5 years ago:
Note however, that it doesn't handle brace-enclosed blocks like
"if (x) { free (x); }". But that's ok, since there were none like
that in git sources.
Beware: if you do use the above snippet, note that it can
produce syntactically invalid C code. That happens when the
affected "if"-statement has a matching "else".
E.g., it would transform this
if (x)
free (x);
else
foo ();
into this:
free (x);
else
foo ();
There were none of those here, either.
If you're interested in automating detection of the useless
tests, you might like the useless-if-before-free script in gnulib:
[it *does* detect brace-enclosed free statements, and has a --name=S
option to make it detect free-like functions with different names]