C program with minimum RAM

Question

I want to understand the memory management in C and C++ programming for Application Development. Application will run on the PC.

If I want to make a program which uses R

Answer 1

Any variables, by definition, must be stored in read/write memory (or RAM). If you are talking about an embedded system with the code initially in ROM, then the runtime will copy the ROM image you identified into RAM to hold the values of the global variables.

Only items marked unchangeable (const) may be kept in the ROM during runtime.

Further, you need to reduce the depth of the calling structure of the program as each function call requires stack space (also in RAM) to record the return address and other values.

To minimise the use of memory, you can try to flag local variables with the register attribute, but this may not be honoured by your compiler.

Another common technique is to dynamically generate large variable data on the fly whenever it is required to avoid having to create buffers. These usually take up much more space the simple variables.