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can realloc move pointer if new size smaller?

开发者 https://www.devze.com 2022-12-12 00:46 出处:网络
I am wondering whether the C or C++ standard guarantees that a pointer is not changed when realloc is called with a smaller (nonzero) size:

I am wondering whether the C or C++ standard guarantees that a pointer is not changed when realloc is called with a smaller (nonzero) size:

size_t n=1000;
T*ptr=(T开发者_如何学Python*)malloc(n*sizeof(T));
//<--do something useful (that won't touch/reallocate ptr of course)
size_t n2=100;//or any value in [1,n-1]
T*ptr2=(T*)realloc(ptr,n2*sizeof(T));
//<-- are we guaranteed that ptr2==ptr ?

Basically, can the OS decide on its own that since we freed a large memory block, he wants to take advantage of all reallocs to defragment the memory, and somehow move ptr2 ?


http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908775/xsh/realloc.html

Upon successful completion with a size not equal to 0, realloc() returns a pointer to the (possibly moved) allocated space.

Nope, no guarantee


There's no guarantee realloc will return the same location, period.


With realloc, you get absolutely no guarantees about where the memory will live afterwords. I believe that libc's default malloc will only begrudgingly copy memory around, so practically speaking you may be OK. But don't count on it.


realloc is not required to leave the block in place even if it would fit, and in fact the simplest stub implementation is an example where it might not:

  • malloc: call sbrk.
  • realloc: call malloc and memcpy.
  • free: no-op.

This may sound ridiculous, but sometimes for embedded systems an implementation like I've just described is actually the optimal one.


It seems to me that all the current answers (at the time of this answer) do not refer to any standard document.

For C++ I will refer to Working Draft, Standard for Programming Language C++, Document Number: N3337, Date: 2012-01-16, Revises: N3291 that, according to https://isocpp.org/std/the-standard, is the closest free document to the non-free official C++11 standard document; here we find at 20.6.13 C library:

2 The contents are the same as the Standard C library header , with the following changes:[in my opinion the listed changes are not relevant to the question].

So now we have to refer to the C standard.

According to https://stackoverflow.com/a/83763/15485 the closest free document to the non-free official C11 standard document is Programming languages — C, N1570 Committee Draft — April 12, 2011 ISO/IEC 9899:201x; here we find at 7.22.3.5 The realloc function:

4 The realloc function returns a pointer to the new object (which may have the same value as a pointer to the old object), or a null pointer if the new object could not be allocated.

I am not a native English speaker and so is up to you to interpret the meaning of "may have".


On Windows, the C-Runtime grabs a heap, and then allocates memory from that heap. So the OS won't know about individual memory allocations, and thus won't move things around.

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