Determine size of dynamically allocated memory in C

Question

Is there a way in C to find out the size of dynamically allocated memory?

For example, after

char* p = malloc (100);

Is there

Answer 1

Here's the best way I've seen to create a tagged pointer to store the size with the address. All pointer functions would still work as expected:

Stolen from: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35326444/638848

You could also implement a wrapper for malloc and free to add tags (like allocated size and other meta information) before the pointer returned by malloc. This is in fact the method that a c++ compiler tags objects with references to virtual classes. Here is one working example:

#include 
#include 

void * my_malloc(size_t s) 
{
  size_t * ret = malloc(sizeof(size_t) + s);
  *ret = s;
  return &ret[1];
}

void my_free(void * ptr) 
{
  free( (size_t*)ptr - 1);
}

size_t allocated_size(void * ptr) 
{
  return ((size_t*)ptr)[-1];
}

int main(int argc, const char ** argv) {
  int * array = my_malloc(sizeof(int) * 3);
  printf("%u\n", allocated_size(array));
  my_free(array);
  return 0;
}

The advantage of this method over a structure with size and pointer

 struct pointer
 {
   size_t size;
   void *p;
 };

is that you only need to replace the malloc and free calls. All other pointer operations require no refactoring.