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Lecture

Dynamic Memory Allocation: Basics and Examples

In course

CS-119(a): Information, Computation, Communication

D'une part, le cours aborde: (1) la notion d'algorithme et de représentation de l'information, (2) l'échantillonnage d'un signal et la compression de données et (3) des aspects liés aux systèmes: ordinateur, mémoire, etc. D'autre part, le cours donne une i ...

Description

This lecture covers the fundamentals of dynamic memory allocation in C, focusing on the differences between stack and heap memory, the advantages and limitations of each, and the steps to properly manage dynamically allocated memory. The instructor explains the use of helper functions like malloc, calloc, realloc, and free, and provides examples of dynamically growing arrays and array of structures. The lecture emphasizes the importance of allocating and freeing memory space correctly to prevent memory leaks and optimize memory usage.

Instructors (3)

Dan-Cristian Tomozei

Mirjana Stojilovic

Mirjana Stojilović received the Dipl. Ing. and Ph.D. degrees from the School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, in 2006 and 2013, respectively. From 2010 to 2013, she was collaborating with the Processor Architecture Laboratory at EPFL, visiting periodically as a Guest Researcher. From 2013 to 2016, she was working at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland as a senior researcher, and at EPFL as a lecturer. She joined Parallel Systems Architecture Lab at EPFL in October 2016. Mirjana's main research interests include electronic design automation, reconfigurable computing, electromagnetic-compatibility and signal-integrity issues, and hardware security. Mirjana Stojilović serves on the program committee of the FPGA, FPL, and FCCM conferences and as a reviewer for IEEE TCAD, TVLSI, TC, TEMC, IEEE Access and ACM TRETS. She received the Best Paper Award at 2016 International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC Europe 2016), Young Scientist Award at 33rd International Conference on Lightning Protection (ICLP2016), and the Young Author Best Paper Award at the 20th Telecommunication Forum in Belgrade (TELFOR 2012). In 2015, the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) presented her with the Teaching Award.

Olivier Lévêque

Olivier Lévêque was born in Switzerland in 1971. He received the physics diploma from EPFL in 1995 and completed his PhD in mathematics at EPFL in 2001. Since then, he has been with the Laboratory of Information Theory at EPFL. He spent the academical year 2005-2006 at the Electrical Engineering Department of Stanford University, where he was appointed as lecturer. His research interests include stochastic analysis, random matrices, wireless communications and information theory.

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.

Dynamic array

In computer science, a dynamic array, growable array, resizable array, dynamic table, mutable array, or array list is a random access, variable-size list data structure that allows elements to be added or removed. It is supplied with standard libraries in many modern mainstream programming languages. Dynamic arrays overcome a limit of static arrays, which have a fixed capacity that needs to be specified at allocation.

Array (data type)

In computer science, array is a data type that represents a collection of elements (values or variables), each selected by one or more indices (identifying keys) that can be computed at run time during program execution. Such a collection is usually called an array variable or array value. By analogy with the mathematical concepts vector and matrix, array types with one and two indices are often called vector type and matrix type, respectively. More generally, a multidimensional array type can be called a tensor type, by analogy with the physical concept, tensor.

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.

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