Question

What are the differences between malloc and new in terms of their respective mechanisms of handling memory allocation?

Answer 1

• malloc doesn’t throw bad_alloc exception as new does.
  • Because malloc doesn’t throw exceptions, you have to check its result against NULL (or nullptr in c++11 and above), which isn’t necessary with new. However, new can be used in a way it won’t throw expections, as when function set_new_handler is set
• malloc and free do not call object constructors and destructors, since there is no objects in C.
• see this question and this post.