Dynamic arrays
Arrays that can be resized dynamically can be produced with the help of the C standard library. The malloc function provides a simple method for allocating memory. It takes one parameter: the amount of memory to allocate in bytes. Upon successful allocation, malloc returns a generic (void) pointer value, pointing to the beginning of the allocated space. The pointer value returned is converted to an appropriate type implicitly by assignment. If the allocation could not be completed, malloc returns a null pointer. The following segment is therefore similar in function to the above desired declaration:
#include <stdlib.h> /* declares malloc */
...
int *a = NULL;
IF ((a = malloc(n * sizeof(int))) == NULL)
exit(1);
a[3] = 10;
The result is a "pointer to int" variable (a) that points to the first of n contiguous int objects; due to array–pointer equivalence this can be used in place of an actual array name, as shown in the last line. The advantage in using this dynamic allocation is that the amount of memory that is allocated to it can be limited to what is actually needed at run time, and this can be changed as needed (using the standard library function realloc).
When the dynamically-allocated memory is no longer needed, it should be released back to the run-time system. This is done with a call to the free function. It takes a single parameter: a pointer to previously allocated memory. This is the value that was returned by a previous call to malloc.
As a security measure, some programmers then set the pointer variable to NULL:
free(a);
a = NULL;
This ensures that further attempts to dereference the pointer will crash the program. If this is not done, the variable becomes a dangling pointer which can lead to a use-after-free bug. However, if the pointer is a local variable, setting it to NULL does not prevent the program from using other copies of the pointer. Local use-after-free bugs are usually easy for static analyzers to recognize. Therefore, this approach is less useful for local pointers and it is more often used with pointers stored in long-living structs.
