I’ll explain how that works, in a second. Because this is managed by software, malloc, free and realloc, the person implementing that can use whatever heuristics they want to make it run as quickly and efficiently and, obviously, as correctly as possible. And so we’re gonna talk about some of those heuristics and how that works. Now you’ve always been under the impression that, when you do this – I’ll just call it ARR is equal to malloc – and you do something like 40 times the size of, oops, the size of int. And actually, I’ll go ahead and strongly type this pointer, to not be a void star but to be an int. You’re under the impression that you get actually 16o bytes back. ...

See the whole transcript at Programming Paradigms - Lecture 08