What are the differences and similarities between malloc and calloc in C?

• Difference Between Malloc and Calloc
• Similarities Between Malloc and Calloc
• Syntax of Malloc
• Syntax of Calloc

There are two major differences between malloc and calloc in C programming language: first, in the number of arguments. The malloc() takes a single argument, while calloc() takess two. Second, malloc() does not initialize the memory allocated, while calloc() initializes the allocated memory to ZERO.

Both malloc and calloc are used in C language for dynamic memory allocation they obtain blocks of memory dynamically. Dynamic memory allocation is a unique feature of C language that enables us to create data types and structures of any size and length suitable to our programs. Following are the major differences and similarities between malloc and calloc in detail with their syntax and example usage.

Difference Between Malloc and Calloc

Similarities Between Malloc and Calloc

The pointer returned by malloc or calloc has the proper alignment for the object in question, but it must be cast into the appropriate type.

Proper alignment means the value of the returned address is guaranteed to be an even multiple of alignment. The value of alignment must be a power of two and must be greater than or equal to the size of a word.

The malloc(), calloc() functions will fail if:

• The physical limits of the system are exceeded by n bytes of memory which cannot be allocated.
• There is not enough memory available to allocate n bytes of memory; but the application could try again later.

Syntax of Malloc

void *malloc(size_t n);

Allocates n bytes of memory. If the allocation succeeds, a void pointer to the allocated memory is returned. Otherwise NULL is returned.

/* Allocate memory for an int. */
int *ptr = (int*) malloc(sizeof (int)); 
if (ptr == NULL) 
{
  printf("Could not allocate memory\n");
  exit(-1);
}
else
  printf("Memory allocated successfully.\n");

Syntax of Calloc

void *calloc(size_t n, size_t size);

Allocates a contiguous block of memory large enough to hold n elements of size bytes each. The allocated region is initialized to zero.

/* Allocating memory for an array of 10 elements of type int. */
int *ptr = (int*) calloc(10 ,sizeof (int));
if (ptr == NULL) 
{
  printf("Could not allocate memory\n");
  exit(-1);
} 
else
  printf("Memory allocated successfully.\n");

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