LocalAlloc Vs GlobalAlloc Vs malloc Vs new

Question

I have searched for this on various links, but still the doubt persist.

I do not understand the difference between LocalAlloc vs GlobalAlloc

Answer 1

GlobalAlloc and LocalAlloc are old functions from the 16 bit era. The difference was that you sometimes had to be able to allocate memory only used in your segment (that used near pointers), and sometimes needed to allocate memory to be shared with other processes and segments on the system. Today, these guys forward in some form or another to the HeapXxx functions, such as HeapAlloc. If you're writing new code and need to avoid linking with the C runtime, you should use the HeapXxx functions instead. Of course, if you call any of these, your program will only compile and run on Windows.

malloc is "run-time dependent" in that using it requires that you link against the C run-time (CRT). The CRT is the library that contains all the other standard C library functions, like printf or qsort. You can write a plain Win32 API program without linking with this (but I honestly can't see why you'd want to do that in real software).

new is compiler dependent and language dependent in that they require a compiler that can compile C++. (And usually new is implemented in terms of malloc, so it'll probably require using the CRT as well)