Checking if something was malloced

Question

Given a pointer to some variable.. is there a way to check whether it was statically or dynamically allocated??

Answer 1

Since the heap, the stack, and the static data area generally occupy different ranges of memory, it is possible with intimate knowledge of the process memory map, to look at the address and determine which allocation area it is in. This technique is both architecture and compiler specific, so it makes porting your code more difficult.