Heap management

Safety-critical embedded systems are often designed not to implement any dynamic memory allocation. While this may sound extreme, it minimizes the impact of the most common programming mistakes in the application code, which might lead to catastrophic consequences for the running system.

On the other hand, dynamic allocation is a powerful tool because it gives complete control over the lifetime and the size of the memory blocks. Many third-party libraries designed for embedded devices expect an existing implementation of dynamic memory allocation. Dynamic memory is managed through a heap structure in memory, by keeping track of the status and the size for each allocation, incrementing the pointer to the next area of free memory, and reusing blocks that have been freed if new allocation requests are processed.

A standard programming interface for heap allocation consists of two basic functions:

void *malloc(size_t size);
void free(void *ptr);

These function...