Embedded Systems Architecture

Common heap usage errors

The use of dynamic memory allocation is considered unsafe in some environments, as it is widely known to be the source of nasty bugs, which are in general both critical and very hard to identify and fix. Dynamic allocations may be difficult to track, especially when the code grows in size and complexity and there are many dynamically allocated data structures. This is already very serious in multi-threaded environments, where it is still possible to implement fallback mechanisms, such as terminating a misbehaving application, but it becomes critical on single-threaded embedded systems, where these kinds of errors are often fatal for the system. The most common types of errors when programming with heap allocations ...