Difference Between malloc() and calloc() with Examples

Pre-requisite: Dynamic Memory Allocation in C using malloc(), calloc(), free() and realloc()
The functions malloc() and calloc() are library functions that allocate memory dynamically. Dynamic means the memory is allocated during runtime (execution of the program) from the heap segment.

Initialization

malloc() allocates a memory block of given size (in bytes) and returns a pointer to the beginning of the block. malloc() doesn’t initialize the allocated memory. If you try to read from the allocated memory without first initializing it, then you will invoke undefined behavior, which will usually mean the values you read will be garbage.

calloc() allocates the memory and also initializes every byte in the allocated memory to 0. If you try to read the value of the allocated memory without initializing it, you’ll get 0 as it has already been initialized to 0 by calloc().

Parameters

malloc() takes a single argument, which is the number of bytes to allocate.

Unlike malloc(), calloc() takes two arguments: 
1) Number of blocks to be allocated. 
2) Size of each block in bytes.

Return Value

After successful allocation in malloc() and calloc(), a pointer to the block of memory is returned otherwise NULL is returned which indicates failure. 

Example

C

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main()
{
    // Both of these allocate the same number of bytes,
    // which is the amount of bytes that is required to
    // store 5 int values.

    // The memory allocated by calloc will be
    // zero-initialized, but the memory allocated with
    // malloc will be uninitialized so reading it would be
    // undefined behavior.
    int* allocated_with_malloc = malloc(5 * sizeof(int));
    int* allocated_with_calloc = calloc(5, sizeof(int));

    // As you can see, all of the values are initialized to
    // zero.
      printf("Values of allocated_with_calloc: ");
    for (size_t i = 0; i < 5; ++i) {
        printf("%d ", allocated_with_calloc[i]);
    }
    putchar('\n');

    // This malloc requests 1 terabyte of dynamic memory,
    // which is unavailable in this case, and so the
    // allocation fails and returns NULL.
    int* failed_malloc = malloc(1000000000000);
    if (failed_malloc == NULL) {
        printf("The allocation failed, the value of "
               "failed_malloc is: %p",
               (void*)failed_malloc);
    }

    // Remember to always free dynamically allocated memory.
    free(allocated_with_malloc);
    free(allocated_with_calloc);
}

Output

Values of allocated_with_calloc: 0 0 0 0 0 
The allocation failed, the value of failed_malloc is: (nil)

Let us see the differences in a tabular form -:

	malloc()	calloc()
1.	It is a function that creates one block of memory of a fixed size.	It is a function that assigns more than one block of memory to a single variable.
2.	It only takes one argument	It takes two arguments.
3.	It is faster than calloc.	It is slower than malloc()
4.	It has high time efficiency	It has low time efficiency
5.	It is used to indicate memory allocation	It is used to indicate contiguous memory allocation
6.	Syntax : void* malloc(size_t size);	Syntax : void* calloc(size_t num, size_t size);
8.	It does not initialize the memory to zero	It initializes the memory to zero
9.	It does not add any extra memory overhead	It add some extra memory overhead