Mastering Custom Memory Allocators in C

Why Standard Malloc Fails in High-Performance Firmware

Standard `malloc` and `free` introduce non-deterministic latency and fragmentation over time. For real-time applications, custom memory arenas ensure O(1) allocation speed.

Arena Allocator Implementation

typedef struct {
    unsigned char *buffer;
    size_t capacity;
    size_t offset;
} Arena;

void *arena_alloc(Arena *arena, size_t size) { if (arena->offset + size > arena->capacity) return NULL; void *ptr = &arena->buffer[arena->offset]; arena->offset += size; return ptr; } ```