But, malloc doesn't have to be significantly advanced. In a situation where you have a large chunk of memory unallocated, the simplest thing to do is just to "b

But, malloc doesn't have to be significantly advanced. In a situation where you have a large chunk of memory unallocated, the simplest thing to do is just to "bump" allocate it. Freeing it is a bit of pain of course, but you could build a freelist out of the chunks that are free. So, the suggestion looks like this: struct freemem { int len; char *addr; struct freemem *next; }; // globals int total_mem_size; char *start_of_memory; char *bump_pointer; struct freemem *freelist; Allocate is simply: if bump_pointer + MIN(size_to_allocate, sizeof(struct freemem)) < total_mem_size: int *b = (int *) bump_pointer; *b = MIN(size_to_allocate, sizeof(struct freemem); return b + sizeof(int) else iterate over freelist, checking for size_to_allocate < freelist->len return freelist->addr (the *b business is already taken care of) Deallocate simply turns the discarded memory into a struct freemem and prepends it to the freelist, setting addr = the discarded address, and len = *(addr - sizeof(int)) (it's for this reason that we allocate a minimum size of sizeof(struct freemem)) That's a basic malloc / free.