Memory Management

Memory management, or memory allocation, is the process by which computer programs are assigned to physical or virtual memory space. Computer memory is a finite resource that must be efficiently managed.

The memory allocation can be done either before or at the time of program implementation. There are two techniques for memory allocation: static memory allocation and dynamic memory allocation.

In this type of allocation, the compiler allocates a fixed amount of memory during compile time and the operating system internally uses a data structure known as stack to manage the memory.

Exact memory requirements must be known in advance as once memory is allocated it can not be changed.

int days; // Needs to be initialized or assigned some value at run time
int snowfall = 0; // Normal variable
const int maxScore = 10; // Constant, can not be changed

In this type of allocation, system memory is managed at runtime. Dynamic memory management in C programming language is performed using the malloc(), calloc(), realloc(), and free() functions. These four functions are defined in the <stdlib.h> C standard library header file. It uses the heap space of the system memory. More can be learned about these functions below: