Many many different ways to allocate memory. malloc, new, HeapAlloc, LocalAlloc, GlobalAlloc, CoTaskMemAlloc, etc. GlobalAlloc and LocalAlloc are pretty much

Many many different ways to allocate memory. malloc, new, HeapAlloc, LocalAlloc, GlobalAlloc, CoTaskMemAlloc, etc. GlobalAlloc and LocalAlloc are pretty much obsolete. "malloc" sometimes redirects to HeapAlloc with the default process heap, but only sometimes, it depends entirely on which compiler and CRT is used. It just causes one big headache that a DLL can't simply return a pointer and have the caller use "free", because malloc/free can be incompatible across modules. This just led to the COM standard, featuring reference-counted objects that don't care what underlying way was used to allocate the memory. For the situations where you do need memory buffers, COM enforces the use of CoTaskMemAlloc/CoTaskMemFree.