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 malloc, realloc, calloc, aligned_alloc and free. The C++ programming language includes these functions; however, the operators new and delete provide similar functionality and are recommended by that language's authors. Still, there are several situations in which using / is not applicable, such as garbage collection code or performance-sensitive code, and a combination of and placement may be required instead of the higher-level operator. Many different implementations of the actual memory allocation mechanism, used by malloc, are available. Their performance varies in both execution time and required memory.

Rationale

The C programming language manages memory statically, automatically, or dynamically. Static-duration variables are allocated in main memory, usually along with the executable code of the program, and persist for the lifetime of the program; automatic-duration variables are allocated on the stack and come and go as functions are called and return. For static-duration and automatic-duration variables, the size of the allocation must be compile-time constant (except for the case of variable-length automatic arrays ). If the required size is not known until run-time (for example, if data of arbitrary size is being read from the user or from a disk file), then using fixed-size data objects is inadequate. The lifetime of allocated memory can also cause concern. Neither static- nor automatic-duration memory is adequate for all situations. Automatic-allocated data cannot persist across multiple function calls, while static data persists for the life of the program whether it is needed or not. In many situations the programmer requires greater flexibility in managing the lifetime of allocated memory. These limitations are avoided by using dynamic memory allocation, in which memory is more explicitly (but more flexibly) managed, typically by allocating it from the an area of memory structured for this purpose. In C, the library function is used to allocate a block of memory on the heap. The program accesses this block of memory via a pointer that returns. When the memory is no longer needed, the pointer is passed to which deallocates the memory so that it can be used for other purposes. The original description of C indicated that and were in the standard library, but not. Code for a simple model implementation of a storage manager for Unix was given with and as the user interface functions, and using the system call to request memory from the operating system. The 6th Edition Unix documentation gives and as the low-level memory allocation functions. The and 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. ). This memory is automatically freed when the calling function ends.

Overview of functions

The C dynamic memory allocation functions are defined in header ( header in C++).

Differences between and

Usage example

Creating an array of ten integers with automatic scope is straightforward in C: However, the size of the array is fixed at compile time. If one wishes to allocate a similar array dynamically without using a variable-length array, which is not guaranteed to be supported in all C11 implementations, the following code can be used: This computes the number of bytes that ten integers occupy in memory, then requests that many bytes from and assigns the result to a pointer named (due to C syntax, pointers and arrays can be used interchangeably in some situations). Because might not be able to service the request, it might return a null pointer and it is good programming practice to check for this: When the program no longer needs the dynamic array, it must eventually call to return the memory it occupies to the free store: The memory set aside by is not initialized and may contain cruft: the remnants of previously used and discarded data. After allocation with, elements of the array are uninitialized variables. The command will return an allocation that has already been cleared: With realloc we can resize the amount of memory a pointer points to. For example, if we have a pointer acting as an array of size n and we want to change it to an array of size m, we can use realloc. Note that realloc must be assumed to have changed the base address of the block (i.e. if it has failed to extend the size of the original block, and has therefore allocated a new larger block elsewhere and copied the old contents into it). Therefore, any pointers to addresses within the original block are also no longer valid.

Type safety

returns a void pointer, which indicates that it is a pointer to a region of unknown data type. The use of casting is required in C++ due to the strong type system, whereas this is not the case in C. One may "cast" (see type conversion) this pointer to a specific type: There are advantages and disadvantages to performing such a cast.

Advantages to casting

Disadvantages to casting

Common errors

The improper use of dynamic memory allocation can frequently be a source of bugs. These can include security bugs or program crashes, most often due to segmentation faults. Most common errors are as follows: In addition, as an interface that precedes ANSI C standardization, malloc and its associated functions have behaviors that were intentionally left to the implementation to define for themselves. One of them is the zero-length allocation, which is more of a problem with realloc since it is more common to resize to zero. Although both POSIX and the Single Unix Specification require proper handling of 0-size allocations by either returning NULL or something else that can be safely freed, not all platforms are required to abide by these rules. Among the many double-free errors that it has led to, the 2019 WhatsApp RCE was especially prominent. A way to wrap these functions to make them safer is by simply checking for 0-size allocations and turning them into those of size 1. (Returning NULL has its own problems: it otherwise indicates an out-of-memory failure. In the case of realloc it would have signaled that the original memory was not moved and freed, which again is not the case for size 0, leading to the double-free.)

Implementations

The implementation of memory management depends greatly upon operating system and architecture. Some operating systems supply an allocator for malloc, while others supply functions to control certain regions of data. The same dynamic memory allocator is often used to implement both and the operator in C++.

Heap-based

Implementation of legacy allocators was commonly done using the heap segment. The allocator would usually expand and contract the heap to fulfill allocation requests. The heap method suffers from a few inherent flaws:

dlmalloc and ptmalloc

Doug Lea has developed the public domain dlmalloc ("Doug Lea's Malloc") as a general-purpose allocator, starting in 1987. The GNU C library (glibc) is derived from Wolfram Gloger's ptmalloc ("pthreads malloc"), a fork of dlmalloc with threading-related improvements. As of November 2023, the latest version of dlmalloc is version 2.8.6 from August 2012. dlmalloc is a boundary tag allocator. Memory on the heap is allocated as "chunks", an 8-byte aligned data structure which contains a header, and usable memory. Allocated memory contains an 8- or 16-byte overhead for the size of the chunk and usage flags (similar to a dope vector). Unallocated chunks also store pointers to other free chunks in the usable space area, making the minimum chunk size 16 bytes on 32-bit systems and 24/32 (depends on alignment) bytes on 64-bit systems. Unallocated memory is grouped into "bins" of similar sizes, implemented by using a double-linked list of chunks (with pointers stored in the unallocated space inside the chunk). Bins are sorted by size into three classes: Game developer Adrian Stone argues that dlmalloc, as a boundary-tag allocator, is unfriendly for console systems that have virtual memory but do not have demand paging. This is because its pool-shrinking and growing callbacks (sysmalloc/systrim) cannot be used to allocate and commit individual pages of virtual memory. In the absence of demand paging, fragmentation becomes a greater concern.

FreeBSD's and NetBSD's jemalloc

Since FreeBSD 7.0 and NetBSD 5.0, the old implementation (phkmalloc by Poul-Henning Kamp) was replaced by jemalloc, written by Jason Evans. The main reason for this was a lack of scalability of phkmalloc in terms of multithreading. In order to avoid lock contention, jemalloc uses separate "arenas" for each CPU. Experiments measuring number of allocations per second in multithreading application have shown that this makes it scale linearly with the number of threads, while for both phkmalloc and dlmalloc performance was inversely proportional to the number of threads.

OpenBSD's malloc

OpenBSD's implementation of the function makes use of mmap. For requests greater in size than one page, the entire allocation is retrieved using ; smaller sizes are assigned from memory pools maintained by within a number of "bucket pages", also allocated with. On a call to, memory is released and unmapped from the process address space using. This system is designed to improve security by taking advantage of the address space layout randomization and gap page features implemented as part of OpenBSD's system call, and to detect use-after-free bugs—as a large memory allocation is completely unmapped after it is freed, further use causes a segmentation fault and termination of the program. The GrapheneOS project initially started out by porting OpenBSD's memory allocator to Android's Bionic C Library.

Hoard malloc

Hoard is an allocator whose goal is scalable memory allocation performance. Like OpenBSD's allocator, Hoard uses exclusively, but manages memory in chunks of 64 kilobytes called superblocks. Hoard's heap is logically divided into a single global heap and a number of per-processor heaps. In addition, there is a thread-local cache that can hold a limited number of superblocks. By allocating only from superblocks on the local per-thread or per-processor heap, and moving mostly-empty superblocks to the global heap so they can be reused by other processors, Hoard keeps fragmentation low while achieving near linear scalability with the number of threads.

mimalloc

An open-source compact general-purpose memory allocator from Microsoft Research with focus on performance. The library is about 11,000 lines of code.

Thread-caching malloc (tcmalloc)

Every thread has a thread-local storage for small allocations. For large allocations mmap or sbrk can be used. TCMalloc, a malloc developed by Google, has garbage-collection for local storage of dead threads. The TCMalloc is considered to be more than twice as fast as glibc's ptmalloc for multithreaded programs.

In-kernel

Operating system kernels need to allocate memory just as application programs do. The implementation of within a kernel often differs significantly from the implementations used by C libraries, however. For example, memory buffers might need to conform to special restrictions imposed by DMA, or the memory allocation function might be called from interrupt context. This necessitates a implementation tightly integrated with the virtual memory subsystem of the operating system kernel.

Overriding malloc

Because and its relatives can have a strong impact on the performance of a program, it is not uncommon to override the functions for a specific application by custom implementations that are optimized for application's allocation patterns. The C standard provides no way of doing this, but operating systems have found various ways to do this by exploiting dynamic linking. One way is to simply link in a different library to override the symbols. Another, employed by Unix System V.3, is to make and function pointers that an application can reset to custom functions. The most common form on POSIX-like systems is to set the environment variable LD_PRELOAD with the path of the allocator, so that the dynamic linker uses that version of malloc/calloc/free instead of the libc implementation.

Allocation size limits

The largest possible memory block can allocate depends on the host system, particularly the size of physical memory and the operating system implementation. Theoretically, the largest number should be the maximum value that can be held in a type, which is an implementation-dependent unsigned integer representing the size of an area of memory. In the C99 standard and later, it is available as the constant from. Although not guaranteed by ISO C, it is usually. On glibc systems, the largest possible memory block can allocate is only half this size, namely.

Extensions and alternatives

The C library implementations shipping with various operating systems and compilers may come with alternatives and extensions to the standard interface. Notable among these is: