Pssst! Hey…hey, buddy, wanna get an extra KB for cheap?

When I write OO-style code in C, I usually start with something like the following, in which I use malloc() to allocate memory for a variable of a particular type, perform some initialization actions, and then return it to the caller:

Button *button_new(uint8_t pin, uint8_t poll_freq) {
    Button *button = (Button *)malloc(sizeof(Button));
    // do some initialization stuff

    return button;
}

And when initially writing pipower, that’s exactly what I did. But while thinking about it after the fact, I realized the following:

  • I’m designing for a fixed piece of hardware. I have a fixed number of inputs; I don’t actually need to create new Button variables dynamically at runtime.
  • The ATtiny85 only has 8KB of memory. Do I really need the overhead of malloc()?

The answer, of course, is that no, I don’t, so I rewrote the code so that it only has statically allocated structures. This reduced the size of the resulting binary from this:

AVR Memory Usage
----------------
Device: attiny85

Program:    3916 bytes (47.8% Full)
(.text + .data + .bootloader)

Data:         35 bytes (6.8% Full)
(.data + .bss + .noinit)

To this:

AVR Memory Usage
----------------
Device: attiny85

Program:    3146 bytes (38.4% Full)
(.text + .data + .bootloader)

Data:         29 bytes (5.7% Full)
(.data + .bss + .noinit)

That’s a savings of just under 800 bytes, which on the one hand doesn’t seem like it a lot…but on the other hand saves 10% of the available memory!

Debugging caveat⌗

If you remove malloc() from your code and then try to debug it with gdb, you may find yourself staring at the following error:

evaluation of this expression requires the program to have a function "malloc".

This will happen if you ask gdb to do something that requires allocating memory for e.g., a string buffer. The solution is to ensure that malloc() is linked into your code when you build for debugging. I use something like the following:

#ifdef DEBUG
__attribute__((optimize("O0")))
void _force_malloc() {
  malloc(0);
}
#endif

The __attribute__((optimize("O0"))) directive disables all optimizations for this function, which should prevent gcc from optimizing out the reference to malloc().