Malloc -> how much memory has been allocated?

Question

# include 
# include 
# include 
# include 

int main ()
{
  char * buffer;
  buffer = malloc (2);

          


        

Answer 1

The compiler doesn't know. This is the joy and terror of C. malloc belongs to the runtime. All the compilers knows is that you have told it that it returns a void*, it has no idea how much, or how much strcpy is going to copy.

Tools like valgrind detect some of these errors. Other programming languages make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot. Not C.