What is realloc
in C?
In C, the most fundamental dynamic memory functions are malloc
and free
, provided in stdlib.h
. The malloc
(“memory allocate”) function allocates a block of memory on the heap; the free
function frees it again. Their signatures are:
void* malloc(size_t size);
void free(void* ptr);
But there are a couple more: calloc
and realloc
.
void* calloc(size_t how_many, size_t num_elements);
void* realloc(void* original, size_t new_size);
The calloc
(“clear alloc”) function behaves like malloc
, with two differences:
- Instead of a raw
size_t
, it takes twosize_t
s: the first representing the number of objects in an array, and the second representing the size of each object in the array. It then allocates space for such an array. - It zeroes the allocated memory.
The realloc
(“reallocate”) function takes a pointer to an allocated block, and attempts to expand/contract that block to the new size. If it cannot, it allocates the requested size elsewhere, and copies the old version to it. If the new size is larger than the old, then the trailing memory is uninitialized.
Tagged . All content copyright James Fisher 2016. This post is not associated with my employer.