What's the advantage of malloc?

Question

What is the advantage of allocating a memory for some data. Instead we could use an array of them.

Like

 int *lis;
 lis = (int*) malloc ( sizeof( int ) * n );

 /* Initialize LIS values for all indexes */
 for ( i = 0; i < n; i++ )
 lis[i] = 1;

we could have used an ordinary array.

Well I don't understand exactly how malloc works, what is actually does. So explaining them would be more beneficial for me.

And suppose we replace sizeof(int) * n with just n in the above code and then try to store integer values, what problems might i be facing? And is there a way to print the values stored in the variable directly from the memory allocated space, for example here it is lis?

Answer 1

Your question seems to rather compare dynamically allocated C-style arrays with variable-length arrays, which means that this might be what you are looking for: Why aren't variable-length arrays part of the C++ standard?

However the c++ tag yields the ultimate answer: use std::vector object instead.

As long as it is possible, avoid dynamic allocation and responsibility for ugly memory management ~> try to take advantage of objects with automatic storage duration instead. Another interesting reading might be: Understanding the meaning of the term and the concept - RAII (Resource Acquisition is Initialization)

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"And suppose we replace sizeof(int) * n with just n in the above code and then try to store integer values, what problems might i be facing?"
- If you still consider n to be the amount of integers that it is possible to store in this array, you will most likely experience undefined behavior.

Answer 2

More fundamentally, I think, apart from the stack vs heap and variable vs constant issues (and apart from the fact that you shouldn't be using malloc() in C++ to begin with), is that a local array ceases to exist when the function exits. If you return a pointer to it, that pointer is going to be useless as soon as the caller receives it, whereas memory dynamically allocated with malloc() or new will still be valid. You couldn't implement a function like strdup() using a local array, for instance, or sensibly implement a linked representation list or tree.