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The program accesses this block of memory via a pointer that malloc returns. When the memory is no longer needed, the pointer is passed to free which deallocates the memory so that it can be used for other purposes. The original description of C indicated that calloc and cfree were in the standard library, but not malloc.
The C++ standard library instead provides a dynamic array (collection) that can be extended or reduced in its std::vector template class. The C++ standard does not specify any relation between new / delete and the C memory allocation routines, but new and delete are typically implemented as wrappers around malloc and free. [6]
mimalloc (pronounced "me-malloc") is a free and open-source compact general-purpose memory allocator developed by Microsoft [2] with focus on performance characteristics. The library is about 11000 lines of code and works as a drop-in replacement for malloc of the C standard library [3] and requires no additional code changes.
The garbage collector works with most unmodified C programs, simply by replacing malloc() with GC_MALLOC() calls, replacing realloc() with GC_REALLOC() calls, and removing free() calls. [1] The code piece below shows how one can use Boehm instead of traditional malloc and free in C. [ 6 ]
The standard C library provides the function malloc() for allocating memory blocks from the heap. It takes the size of an object to allocate as a parameter and returns a pointer to a newly allocated block of memory suitable for storing the object, or it returns a null pointer if the allocation failed.
Specifically, C allows a void* pointer to be assigned to any pointer type without a cast, while C++ does not; this idiom appears often in C code using malloc memory allocation, [9] or in the passing of context pointers to the POSIX pthreads API, and other frameworks involving callbacks. For example, the following is valid in C but not C++:
In C++, this ability is put to further use to automate memory deallocation within an otherwise-manual framework, use of the shared_ptr template in the language's standard library to perform memory management is a common paradigm. shared_ptr is not suitable for all object usage patterns, however.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 1 February 2025. General-purpose programming language "C programming language" redirects here. For the book, see The C Programming Language. Not to be confused with C++ or C#. C Logotype used on the cover of the first edition of The C Programming Language Paradigm Multi-paradigm: imperative (procedural ...