As someone with basic C experience, could you link me to some resources about how to use malloc properly (ie, allocating a block of RAM and managing it yourself)? I find the whole thing fascinating.
If you need both malloc and realloc, then these are not the droids you're looking for - the system implementation won't be that much slower than something you can hack together.
If you are using heap RAM for persistence over a long lived application, then again the system version is going to be helpful (you're going to allocate something like a 4KB chunk, and then you'll have to hang on to that as long as >= 1 byte is still needed from it, which will dramatically increase the RAM used by your process compared to what it requires.)
If your particular problem is just "I need to allocate some heap RAM because my arrays might be too big for the stack," then allocating one big chunk at the start of your function (of a size tailored to your particular problem) will save you a bunch of slow system calls.
