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Ben Andrew

benmandrew.com

PhD researcher in formal verification at the University of Manchester, previously building OCaml tooling at Tarides. Articles, interactive projects and published research.

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Systems & Performance 1Software Engineering 1

1

What is malloc doing, anyway?

malloc has a very nice and simple interface: you ask for a certain amount of memory, and you’re given a void pointer to your block of contiguous bytes that’s been magicked into existence. Once you’re done with it, you call free with the same pointer and the memory disappears into the ether.