How much memory does a call to 'malloc' allocates? – Daniel Lemire's blog

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I went to UIUC for CS ('14), in our Systems class we had one project where we had to write our own version of malloc() in C.

They made it into a competition and it was so much fun (graded on latency and efficient space usage). I remember the person who won was a PhD student who had to take the undergrad course as a prereq for some Grade level class.

I loved this class, I graduated one year before and placed in the top 3. Everyone in the top has figured out that the test cases did a bunch of malloc(1) to screw up our memory layout but never tested it, so anything requesting a single byte we all had our code ignore it and return a bogus address immediately. Had they fixed this in the following year?

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