Lecture

Dynamic Memory Allocation in C

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

Description

This lecture covers dynamic memory allocation in C, focusing on the concepts of malloc, calloc, and realloc functions. It explains the differences between static and dynamic memory allocation, emphasizing the importance of proper memory management to avoid memory leaks and errors. The instructor discusses the allocation of memory during program execution, memory overflow issues, and the significance of initializing pointers. Additionally, the lecture delves into dynamic arrays, their implementation, and the process of reallocating memory. Practical examples and best practices for memory allocation and deallocation in C are also highlighted.

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Theoretical computer science

Programming language theory: High-level programming languages

Related concepts (32)

C dynamic memory allocation

C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing manual memory management for dynamic memory allocation in the C programming language via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely , , , and . The C++ programming language includes these functions; however, the operators and provide similar functionality and are recommended by that language's authors. Still, there are several situations in which using new/delete is not applicable, such as garbage collection code or performance-sensitive code, and a combination of malloc and placement new may be required instead of the higher-level new operator.

Memory management

Memory management 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. This is critical to any advanced computer system where more than a single process might be underway at any time. Several methods have been devised that increase the effectiveness of memory management.

Manual memory management

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. Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as Java are increasingly popular and the languages Objective-C and Swift provide similar functionality through Automatic Reference Counting.

Prototype-based programming

Prototype-based programming is a style of object-oriented programming in which behaviour reuse (known as inheritance) is performed via a process of reusing existing objects that serve as prototypes. This model can also be known as prototypal, prototype-oriented, classless, or instance-based programming. Prototype-based programming uses the process generalized objects, which can then be cloned and extended. Using fruit as an example, a "fruit" object would represent the properties and functionality of fruit in general.

Memory leak

In computer science, a memory leak is a type of resource leak that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations in a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released. A memory leak may also happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code (i.e. unreachable memory). A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code.

Related lectures (64)

Pointers: Strings, Functions, Casting

Covers pointers to strings, functions, and casting in C programming.

Pointers and Arrays: Arithmetic, Buffer Overflow

Covers the arithmetic of pointers, the relationship between pointers and arrays, and the concept of buffer overflow in C programming.

Dynamic Memory Allocation in C++

Covers the concept of pointers in C++, dynamic memory allocation, and best practices.

Advanced C Data Types

Covers advanced data types and memory management in C programming, emphasizing type consistency and dynamic array allocation.

Introduction to Programming: Basics of C Language