C memory management

Hey /prog, I'm teaching myself C by writing a roguelike and I noticed that C uses manual memory management for creating objects in the heap. I was wondering if the C-gods could lend me some advice on how to proceed with this:

I want to write a roguelike with thousands of NPCs, every NPC is a really small piece of data which does not contain any pointers (position, stats, behavior... probably ends up being a few bytes). NPCs would spawn and die constantly. How would I go about managing the memory for this?

• malloc and free individual NPCs
• Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector
• malloc a big chunk of memory and build some kind of memory manager on top of it (are there techniques for this?)

Please advice.

>>7
WTF is wrong with you?

Obviously you should just keep the number of active NPCs around.

Obviously assuming that live NPCs begin with a nonzero int is a very bad idea.

Obviously scanning the entire array to find its length is OUTRIGHT RETARDED.


I never thought I'd say that, but it looks like C causes brain damage sometimes.

Go find yourself a book on good C++ code style and never code in C again until you've mastered C++ and know how to write non-retarded code even in C.