Difference between malloc and calloc?

Question

What is the difference between doing:

ptr = (char **) malloc (MAXELEMS * sizeof(char *));

or:

ptr = (char **) calloc (MAXEL         


        

Answer 1

Both malloc and calloc allocate memory, but calloc initialises all the bits to zero whereas malloc doesn't.

Calloc could be said to be equivalent to malloc + memset with 0 (where memset sets the specified bits of memory to zero).

So if initialization to zero is not necessary, then using malloc could be faster.