malloc

When you use malloc the 100th byte is filled with random garbage, while with calloc you get something consistent.

Now, contrast int* array = malloc(256*sizeof(int)); with int* array = alloc<int> (256); The C++ expression is simpler.

With malloc you potentially have short-lived and long-lived interspersed with each other, creating lots of holes/fragmentation.

It's fairly moot for hard real-time programs though, as those typically completely eschew dynamic allocation (malloc can have unpredictable time too).

If you malloc some structure and then painstakingly initialize every member, then calloc is wasteful.

Anyway, spending 25%in malloc/free is just poor code, but you already know that.

I was under the impression that lots of implementations of malloc actually call calloc under the hood.

A related question is why do people use malloc if calloc is available?

Unless you are calling malloc in a tight loop I can’t see the extra step of zeroing being a issue.

Probably the best reason to hate it is if you didn't include the right headers and malloc is therefore implicitly defined to return int.

I don't need to worry about all these things, I have infinite stack, malloc just works.

In my experience using malloc over calloc make it much harder to find subtle bugs that result from off by one under set errors (i.e.

The "stdlib doesn't report failure on allocation" stuff isn't really relevant; it's not like people use libc malloc in the Linux kernel.

Note that when "add" returns a string, it's done an allocation, but for the integer case, it hasn't called "malloc".