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In C, the library function malloc is used to allocate a block of memory on the heap. 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.
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.
A free list (or freelist) is a data structure used in a scheme for dynamic memory allocation. It operates by connecting unallocated regions of memory together in a linked list, using the first word of each unallocated region as a pointer to the next. It is most suitable for allocating from a memory pool, where all objects have the same size.
The Boehm–Demers–Weiser garbage collector, often simply known as the Boehm GC or Boehm collector, is a conservative garbage collector for C and C++ [1] developed by Hans Boehm, Alan Demers, and Mark Weiser. [2] [3] Boehm GC is free software distributed under a permissive free software licence similar to the X11 license. The first paper ...
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]
Another frequent source of dangling pointers is a jumbled combination of malloc() and free() library calls: a pointer becomes dangling when the block of memory it points to is freed. As with the previous example one way to avoid this is to make sure to reset the pointer to null after freeing its reference—as demonstrated below.
Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of resource management applied to computer memory.The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed.
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++: