my_notes.md

Notes For Future Self

Pointer Hell

• Only memory that's allocated using malloc() needs to be freed
• You can't free a struct before freeing its dynamically allocated members
• Some functions uses malloc() internally like strdup()
• Set pointers to NULL after freeing, in case of accidental usage after freeing
• Avoid dangling pointers, if you free a pointer the consider all pointers that pointed to it
• For contiguous allocation, use calloc()
• Use xmalloc() and xcalloc() for program safety

Quirks Of C

• Self-referential structures should be named differently in the typedef to allow self-reference
• Using typedef struct instead of struct omits the need to type struct before variable names
• const char* is a mutable pointer to an immutable string/char
• size_t is used to represent the size of an object