calloc() versus malloc()
February 27, 2010
malloc() allocates memory block of given size (in bytes) and returns a pointer to the beginning of the block.
void * malloc( size_t size );
malloc() doesn’t initialize the allocated memory.
calloc() allocates the memory and also initializes the allocates memory to zero.
void * calloc( size_t num, size_t size );
Unlike malloc(), calloc() takes two arguments: 1) number of blocks to be allocated 2) size of each block.
We can achieve same functionality as calloc() by using malloc() followed by memset(),
ptr = malloc(size); memset(ptr, 0, size);
If we do not want to initialize memory then malloc() is the obvious choice.
Please write comments if you find anything incorrect in the above article or you want to share more information about malloc() and calloc() functions.
