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The malloc and free routines in their modern form are completely described in the 7th Edition Unix manual. 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()). This memory is automatically freed when the calling function ends.
At any given time, some parts of the heap are in use, while some are "free" (unused) and thus available for future allocations. In the C language, the function which allocates memory from the heap is called malloc and the function which takes previously allocated memory and marks it as "free" (to be used by future allocations) is called free.
mimalloc (pronounced "me-malloc") is a free and open-source compact general-purpose memory allocator developed by Microsoft 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 and requires no additional code changes.
In computer science, a pointer is an object in many programming languages that stores a memory address. This can be that of another value located in computer memory, or in some cases, that of memory-mapped computer hardware. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the ...
The term magic number or magic constant refers to the anti-pattern of using numbers directly in source code. This has been referred to as breaking one of the oldest rules of programming, dating back to the COBOL, FORTRAN and PL/1 manuals of the 1960s. [1] The use of unnamed magic numbers in code obscures the developers' intent in choosing that ...
Free list. 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 ...
This is usually much less costly than calling malloc and free anyway. In particular, if the current function contains both calls to alloca and blocks containing variable-length local data then a conflict occurs between alloca's attempts to increase the current stack frame until the current function exits versus the compiler's need to place ...
Memory pool. Memory pools, also called fixed-size blocks allocation, is the use of pools for memory management that allows dynamic memory allocation. Dynamic memory allocation can, and has been achieved through the use of techniques such as malloc and C++ 's operator new; although established and reliable implementations, these suffer from ...