Completion of error handling

[elfring]

Would you like to add more error handling for return values from functions like the following?

• calloc ⇒ xtbuild
• fopen ⇒ xtsave

[glouw]

I'll take a handle for xtload() for fopen. Not too concerned with calloc or fopen for writes failing.

[elfring]

I suggest to avoid ignorance of return values a bit more.
Would you like to detect every error situation as early as possible?

[glouw]

A little overkill in my opinion

[elfring]

I prefer a more complete error detection and exception handling.

[glouw]

Okay, I'll pop in ecalloc() and efopen() wrappers

[glouw]

assertations for callocs and fopens were added instead

[glouw]

actually, now that I think about it, asserts can be disabled globally. efopen and ecalloc were added instead.

[elfring]

Thanks for your small source code improvement.
There are still more function calls to reconsider.

[glouw]

scanf you mean? I'll patch it

[elfring]

Functions like fclose() and fprintf() will need also further software development attention, won't they?

[glouw]

No, assuming that efopen() was successful, fclose() and fprintf() can be used without worry.

[elfring]

Your assumptions are questionable in this case. There are additional failure possibilities to consider.

How do you think about to improve static source code analysis also for your software?

[glouw]

I rely on runtime analysis with valgrind. Static analysis is typically overkill at times. The metrics supplied by gcc's -Wall and -Wextra is usually enough.

[elfring]

Would you like to extend the development methodology with any software tools?

[glouw]

Developments done for the most part as this is a practice in minimalism, If you're looking for a fully developed neural net library then checkout FANN (https://github.com/libfann/fann).