Static v Heap

If you know about heap storage, see Dive 12, then you might be thinking that as static is easier to use than heap storage, why not use it in preference. The advantage of static storage is that no pointers are involved in its creation or management. Its disadvantage is that it isn’t possible to manage it at all. Heap storage can be freed and resized whereas static storage is fixed.

Using static storage can also add to the size of the program file. Static storage and file-level storage is most easily implemented by being compiled into the program and how efficiently this is encoded in the source file varies, but it is possible that if you declare a 1MByte static array the size of your executable increases by 1MByte. This also increases the time it takes to load your program.

Deep C Dives
Adventures in C

By Mike James

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Contents

Preface
Prolog C
Dive

1. All You Need Are Bits
2. These aren’t the types you’re looking for
3. Type Casting
4. Expressions
5. Bits and More Bits
       Extract: Bits!
   
6. The Brilliant But Evil for 
7. Into the Void 
8. Blocks, Stacks and Locals
9. Static Storage
10. Pointers
11. The Array and Pointer Arithmetic
12. Heap, The Third Memory Allocation
13. First Class Functions
        Extract: First Class Functions
    
14. Structs and Objects
        Extract: Value Structs ***NEW!
15. The Union
16. Undefined Behavior
17. Exceptions and the Long Jump
    

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