It will never return NULL, so don't try to handle a NULL condition, since that just confuses programmers and static analyzers. It uses calloc, so all the allocated memory is cleared, so there's no point looping over the memory to manually initialize it NULL. And just because it's annoying, it doesn't need to be the only place in this file to do if (NULL==...) instead of if (... == NULL). Signed-off-by: Alan Coopersmith <alan.coopersmith@oracle.com> Reviewed-by: Paulo Zanoni <paulo.r.zanoni@intel.com>