r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ClipboardCopyPaste • 2d ago

Meme bugIntroducedDebugging

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u/LostgamerFJ 2d ago

I'm not good enough at programming for this. What do the "free" and "malloc" functions do?

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u/Scratch137 2d ago

"malloc" is used to allocate a given number of bytes in the heap. for example, int x* = malloc(5) allocates 5 bytes in the heap and sets x to the address of the first byte.

"free" releases heap-allocated memory. in this case, free(x) frees up the 5 bytes we allocated earlier.