moai-lang-c

Memory management in C involves using malloc, calloc, and realloc for dynamic allocation, paired with free for deallocation. Proper patterns prevent buffer overflows and memory leaks by tracking allocation size, validating pointers before use, and ensuring every allocation has a corresponding free in cleanup paths.

RAII-like patterns in C emulate resource acquisition/release by pairing allocation with guaranteed cleanup using goto-based error handling or cleanup macros. This ensures file handles, network sockets, and dynamically allocated memory are freed even when errors occur, mimicking C++ destructors.

Prevent buffer overflows by validating input size against buffer capacity before copying, using safe string functions, and applying defensive bounds checking. Robust error handling across GCC and Clang toolchains requires checking return values and managing edge cases in file I/O and network communication.

Stack memory is automatically freed when functions return but is limited in size; heap memory persists until freed via free() but requires manual management. Systems programming uses stack for fixed-size locals and heap for dynamically sized buffers, files, and network structures that outlive function scope.

Optimize memory layout by aligning structs to cache line boundaries, minimizing pointer indirection, and grouping frequently accessed fields together. Cache-friendly patterns reduce miss rates in systems programming tasks like file processing and network handling, improving throughput on both GCC and Clang.

Core malloc/free behavior is standard across platforms, but file I/O and process handling differ between POSIX (Linux, macOS) and non-POSIX systems (Windows). Cross-platform C applications must abstract platform-specific system calls while keeping memory management patterns consistent.