Comment by asveikau

Might be acceptable for an individual project where you can make statements about the sizes that will be used ahead of time, but for a general purpose library your statement is absolutely false. The issue is that your size requirement can overflow size_t, malloc gets passed a smaller value than you really intended, then if you try to use what you think you allocated (remember, it succeeded with a smaller size), it's a derefence outside the bounds of the allocation. Changing the size or type of the length variable won't solve that. This is a common and well known vulnerability pattern - it is disappointing to see folks so dismissive of it.