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"The same heap" isn't a coherent concept here. Your malloc-implementing memory allocator has some global state, and that state has some pointers to some addresses it got from mmap and some metadata about how long those spans of memory are, which parts are unused, and how long the values it has returned from malloc previously are. If you managed to use two of these, they would each contain data referring to different non-overlapping sets of memory mappings. If you accidentally used a pointer from one with the other, you would go instantly to C UB land:

  The free() function frees the memory space pointed to by ptr, which must have been returned by a previous call to malloc(), calloc() or realloc(). Otherwise, or if free(ptr) has already been called before, undefined behavior occurs. If ptr is NULL, no operation is performed.



But malloc calls sbrk(), right?


I can't speak to multiple users of sbrk, I assume that would fail. That's a property of sbrk though, not of malloc (or memory allocation in general); on Windows, you can have as many implementors of malloc as you want, so long as malloc/free calls happen to the same implementor. Each malloc implementor just asks for anonymous backing pages for their own heaps (via VirtualAlloc/mmap).


It depends on the implementation. For example, jemalloc can use sbrk(), sbrk() and mmap() or just mmap(), depending on what your os supports.




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