Bare Metal C

Part II C for Big Machines

So far we’ve concentrated on embedded programming. With embedded systems, you have limited memory and limited resources. However, C is designed to work on larger machines with operating systems (that we don’t have to program ourselves), and it has many features that are useful on these larger machines.

For example, there is a memory region called the heap that allows you to allocate and free memory, as needed, to store complex objects. Things like web browsers and XML parsers make extensive use of the heap.

We haven’t covered this before because we barely had enough memory for the stack—and dividing memory into a stack and heap would like dividing a drop of water between two glasses. It’s possible, but very tricky ...