Hello, Array: malloc, free and Manual Bookkeeping
Post 1 of the Dynamic Arrays in C series · Full source code on GitHub The Problem No One Starts With You have five integers. You put them in an array: 1 int numbers[5] = {10, 20, 30, 40, 50}; Done. C gives you a contiguous chunk of 20 bytes on the stack, indexed from 0 to 4, and life is good. Now your user wants to add a sixth integer. What do you do? You can’t resize a stack array. Its size was baked into the binary at compile time — the compiler saw 5, calculated 20 bytes, and that’s the space your function’s stack frame has. There’s no negotiation. You could declare int numbers[1000] and hope it’s big enough, but hope is not a memory management strategy. ...