Chapter 21. Memory Access

Arrays and pointers are low-level building blocks of C programs that provide fast access to hardware memory. This chapter discusses the different ways to organize and access memory.

Direct manipulation of memory entails some serious risks and requires good practices and thorough testing to avoid serious errors. Improper use of pointers and dynamic memory can cause program crashes that result from heap corruption and memory leaks. Heap corruption is especially difficult to debug because it generally leads to segmentation faults that halt the program at a point in the code that may be far from the point at which the heap became corrupted.