Question

I am writing the calloc function in a memory management assignment (I am using C). I have one question, I wrote the malloc function and thinking about using it for calloc as it says calloc will take num and size and return a block of memory that is (num * size) which I can use malloc to create, however, it says that I need to initialize all bytes to 0 and I am confused about how to do that in general?
If you need more info please ask me 🙂

So malloc will return a pointer (Void pointer) to the first of the usable memory and i have to go through the bytes, initialize them to zero, and return the pointer to that front of the usable memory.

Answer 1

I am assuming you can’t use memset because it’s a homework assignment assignment, and deals with memory management. So, I would just go in a loop and set all bytes to 0. Pseudocode:

for i = 1 to n:
   data[i] = 0

Oh, if you’re having trouble understanding how to dereference void *, remember you can do:

void *b;
/* now make b point to somewhere useful */
unsigned char *a = b;