Memory allocation

Memory allocation is creating space in a spot of memory where data can be stored.

When declaring static or global variables, static allocation creates a block of space, a fixed size of the variable, and is never freed. ¹

In cases where the size of the data structure is not known before the program runs, you would want to do dynamic memory allocation. In other words, the size of the data structure is changed during runtime. ²

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1. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Memory-Allocation-and-C.html ↩

2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dynamic-memory-allocation-in-c-using-malloc-calloc-free-and-realloc/ ↩