Heap memory

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  • c.

Heap memory is used for storing variable data of an unknown size. It operates relies on a global pool of memory with no fixed organisational structrue. Because heap memory requires searching for blocks of RAM large enough to store the requested data, operations are much slower than stack memory operations.

Allocation and deallocation rely on memory management strategies like ARC and “garbage collection”. Heap memory is typically used for dynamically sized structures, large data types, and non-local variables.

Example

A dynamically sized array is manually allocated memory on the “heap” in a C program. Allocated memory is manually deallocated (“freed”) and the pointer set to NULL before the end of the function to prevent memory leaking.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>


int main()
{
    int *arr = (int *)malloc(3 * sizeof(int));


    arr[0] = 16;
    arr[1] = 32;
    arr[2] = 64;


    printf("arr    address: %p\n", (void *)&arr);
    printf("arr[1] address: %p, value: %d\n", (void *)&arr[1], arr[1]);


    free(arr);


    arr = NULL;


    return 0;
}

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