🏨 theHEAPHotel - A C Programming Project

An educational C program highlighting heap usage & how to free the memory after usage.

Table of Contents

• Description
• Demo/Screenshots
• Features
• Tech Stack
• Project Structure
• Prerequisites
• Installation
• Usage
• Contributing
• License

Description

The HEAP Hotel project is designed to demonstrate a simple C programming project. It specificially highlights using the heap and freeing memory after its usage.

Definition:

In C programming, the Heap (not an acronym, just a name for a "pile" of memory) is a region of your computer's RAM used for dynamic memory allocation.

Unlike the Stack, which handles local variables automatically, the Heap is a "free-for-all" area where you, the programmer, manually request and release memory during the execution of a program.

Demo/Screenshots

Features

• 📚 Code Quality: The project is written in clean, readable C code, following best practices for coding standards.
• 🛠️ Modular Design: The project is structured into a single, self-contained C file, making it easy to understand and maintain.
• 📊 Performance: The project is optimized for performance, leveraging the efficiency of the C language.

Tech Stack

• C programming language
• No frameworks or libraries are used in this project.

Project Structure

theHEAPHotel/
├── theHEAPHotel.c              # Source code
└── screenshots/                # Screenshots folder
    ├── theHEAPHotel1.png
    └── theHEAPHotel2.png

Prerequisites

• A C compiler (e.g., GCC) installed on the system.
• A basic understanding of C programming concepts.

Installation

To install the project, follow these steps:

git clone <repository-url>
cd theHEAPHotel

No additional installation steps are required, as the project consists of a single C file.

Usage

To compile and run the project, use the following commands:

gcc theHEAPHotel.c -o theHEAPHotel
./theHEAPHotel

Replace <repository-url> with the actual URL of the repository.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and appreciated. To contribute, please fork the repository, make your changes, and submit a pull request. Ensure that your code follows the same coding standards and best practices as the existing codebase.

License

The theHEAPHotel project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Notes

Great tools I learned about along the way to help C coders:

Tool	Purpose	When to use it
Valgrind	Memory Leaks	When you suspect malloc isn't being free'd (or heap/stack in general).
GDB	Logic Debugging	When your code runs but gives the wrong math.
Cppcheck	Bug Hunting	Before you even run the code.
ASan	Memory Crashes	To find exactly where a "Segfault" happened.
Flawfinder	Vulnerability Scanner	Scans code for CWE (Common Weakness Enumerations).