Hello, Array: malloc, free and Manual Bookkeeping
The article discusses the challenges of managing dynamic arrays in C programming. It emphasizes the importance of bookkeeping for memory management, particularly when using malloc to allocate memory on the heap. The author introduces a simple dynamic array structure that tracks the size and capacity of the array to prevent memory-related bugs.
- ▪Dynamic arrays in C cannot be resized once allocated on the stack.
- ▪The malloc function allows for dynamic memory allocation on the heap, but requires manual bookkeeping.
- ▪A metadata struct is essential for tracking the size and capacity of a dynamic array.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/pablogs/hello-array-malloc-free-and-manual-bookkeeping-4062 |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 07:37:41 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T07:49:59.659Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T07:49:59.659Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XBoZsgWewi4W |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3957976) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Pablo GS Posted on May 29 • Originally published at pablogs.dev Hello, Array: malloc, free and Manual Bookkeeping #c #programming #tutorial #computerscience Post 1 of the Dynamic Arrays in C series · Full source code The Problem No One Starts With You have five integers. You put them in an array: int numbers[5] = {10, 20, 30, 40, 50}; Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Done. C gives you a contiguous chunk of 20 bytes on the stack, indexed from 0 to 4, and life is good.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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