Dynamically Allocated Memory

Languages like MATLAB, Python, etc, allow us to work with data structures like arrays, lists, etc, that we can dynamically resize. That is to say, we can make them longer, shorter, etc, even after they are created. In C, this is not so easy.

Once we’ve allocated a variable such as an array on the stack, it is fixed in its size. We cannot make it longer or shorter. In contrast, if we use the functions malloc or calloc to allocate an array on the heap, we can use the function realloc to resize it at some later time. In order to use these functions we need to include stdlib.h at the top of our C file.

The built-in functions malloc, calloc, realloc memcpy and free are what we use to manage dynamically allocated data structures on the heap, “by hand”. The life cycle of a heap variable involves three stages:

1. Allocating heap memory for the variable using malloc or calloc
2. (Optionally) resizing the allocated memory using realloc
3. Releasing the memory from the heap using free

Allocating memory using malloc or calloc

These functions are used to allocate memory at runtime. The malloc function takes as input the size of the memory block to be allocated. The calloc function is like malloc except that it also initializes all elements to zero. The calloc function takes two input arguments, the number of elements and the size of each element.

Here’s an example of using malloc to allocate memory to hold an array of 10 structs: