Perhaps one of the most common APIs used by application developers is the renowned malloc(3).
The foo(3) syntax indicates that the foo function is in section 3 of the manual (the man pages) – a library API, not a system call. We recommend you develop the habit of reading the man pages. The man pages are available online, and you can find them at https://linux.die.net/man/.
We use malloc(3) to dynamically allocate a chunk of memory at runtime. This is as opposed to static—or compile-time – memory-allocation where we make a statement, such as:
char buf[256];
In the preceding case, the memory has been statically allocated (at compile-time).
So, how exactly do you use malloc(3)? Let's check out its signature:
#include <stdlib.h> ...
