When and why to use malloc?

malloc is used for dynamic memory allocation. As said, it is dynamic allocation which means you allocate the memory at run time. For example when you don't know the amount of memory during compile time.

One example should clear this. Say you know there will be maximum 20 students. So you can create an array with static 20 elements. Your array will be able to hold maximum 20 students. But what if you don't know the number of students? Say the first input is the number of students. It could be 10, 20, 50 or whatever else. Now you will take input n = the number of students at run time and allocate that much memory dynamically using malloc.

This is just one example. There are many situations like this where dynamic allocation is needed.

Have a look at the man page malloc(3).

You use malloc when you need to allocate objects that must exist beyond the lifetime of execution of the current block (where a copy-on-return would be expensive as well), or if you need to allocate memory greater than the size of that stack (ie: a 3mb local stack array is a bad idea).

Before C99 introduced VLA's, you also needed it to perform allocation of a dynamically sized array, however, its is needed for creation of dynamic data structures like trees, lists & queues, which are used by many systems. there are probably many more reasons, these are just a few.

Expanding the structure of the example a little, consider this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) {

typedef struct {
 char* name;
 char* sex;
 char* insurace;
 int age;
 int yearInSchool;
 float tuitionDue;
}student;


//Now I can do two things
student p;

//or
student *p = malloc(sizeof *p);

}

C a is language that implicitly passes by value, rather than by reference. In this example, if we passed 'p' to a function to do some work on it, we would be creating a copy of the entire structure. This uses additional memory (the total of how much space that particular structure would require), is slower, and potentially does not scale well (more on this in a minute). However, by passing *p, we don't pass the entire structure. We only are passing an address in memory that refers to this structure. The amount of data passed is smaller (size of a pointer), therefore the operation is faster.

Now, knowing this, imagine a program (like a student information system) which will have to create and manage a set of records in the thousands, or even tens of thousands. If you pass the whole structure by value, it will take longer to operate on a set of data, than it would just passing a pointer to each record.