alt Hacker NewsIn C, malloc and free used to often be macros.
As they're freely replaceable through loading, and designed for that, I would strongly suggest that are among the most magical areas of the C standard.
We get a whole section for those in the standard: 7.24.3 Memory management functions
Hell, malloc is allowed to return you _less than you asked for_:
> The pointer returned if the allocation succeeds is suitably aligned so that it may be assigned to a pointer to any type of object with a fundamental alignment requirement and size less than or equal to the size requested
I read the text as saying the object size can be less or equal to returned memory size. Anyway, section 7 is library. As you say, replacing through loading is a common thing to do — surely compiler is not free to simply elide external library function at will? This is not C++ after all, it must be sensible