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The malloc and free routines in their modern form are completely described in the 7th Edition Unix manual. [ 8 ] [ 9 ] Some platforms provide library or intrinsic function calls which allow run-time dynamic allocation from the C stack rather than the heap (e.g. alloca() [ 10 ] ).
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.
In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage.Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp.
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 ]
Dmalloc is a C memory debugger library written by Gray Watson to assist programmers in finding a variety of dynamic memory allocation mistakes. It replaces parts (such as malloc) of the C standard library provided by the operating system or compiler with its own versions, which produce information intended to help the programmer detect problematic code.
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.
Many Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows implement a function called alloca for dynamically allocating stack memory in a way similar to the heap-based malloc.A compiler typically translates it to inlined instructions manipulating the stack pointer, similar to how variable-length arrays are handled. [4]
These functions are typically called from a higher-level memory management library function such as malloc. In the original Unix system, brk and sbrk were the only ways in which applications could acquire additional heap space; later versions allowed this to also be done using the mmap call.