Is it good to use dynamic memory allocation in embedded programming?
Before starting I have to mention few references which were really usefull resources in my “Embedded tips and tricks” – related posts. One of them is Dan Saks’ articles and columns on Embedded.com and another one is Netrino web site and Michael Barrs’ articles. I thought of writing this post in order to explain possible benefits but also the drawbacks that are induced by dynamic memory allocation… in embedded programming. I excluded any faulty use of dynamic allocation such as memory leaks or dangling pointers, so my assumption is that data is correctly allocated and de-allocated. First of all let me just integrate dynamic allocation in the general storage types classification, there are three types (at least in C): Static storage – variables which exist during the whole program execution time; those are global variables and those variables explicitly declared as static Automatic storage- variables which are allocated upon entrance into a block (something delimited by curly brackets {}
