[eacnamn]

all malloc is defined to do is to return a pointer to storage of appropriate size and alignment, which can easily be done in pure standard C by defining a static array and chopping it up as needed. that's not a brilliant way of doing that, but achievable without leaving standard C

[gpderetta]

AFAIK that can break because of the strict aliasing rules (although it might work in practice). Even if char can alias anything, the reverse is not true and you can't legally store other types in a static array of char type. You should be able to use anonymous memory though, so for example if you get your storeag via mmap or some other allocator it should be fine.

[astrange]

There isn't anything called mmap in the C standard. That's what I mean by it not being possible to implement in standard C. It is possible in some implementations of C.

[astrange]

> The malloc function allocates space for an object whose size is specified by size and whose value is indeterminate.

> The lifetime of an allocated object extends from the allocation until the deallocation. Each such allocation shall yield a pointer to an object disjoint from any other object.

A static array is "an object" already. A pointer to the middle of it is not a new object.