[termie]

Yes, the kernel will map virtual to physical however it sees fit, no guarantees there (at least not in user-space via glibc). Realloc will always return a virtually contiguous slice or NULL if it can’t. And you’re right, obviously all those potential subordinate mallocs would be inefficient. :) In this contrived FizzBuzz example case, you could pretty easily do the math and just malloc it all in one go at the start of the function. Fizz and Buzz are the same size, you would just need to add up the iota lengths and the trailing \0. If you take an arg for N (1..N) then stack allocations are not going to work. You need to statically declare their size.

[Steven_Vellon]

What I'm getting at, though, is that it's possible to implement it without any copies even if the memory consumption cannot be predetermined. Bypass malloc() and realloc() entirely and invoke brk() to increase the program's segment size. This grows the data segment contiguously (in virtual memory), so there will never be a need to copy the result string to a different buffer. In other words point the result pointer to the start of the heap, and never put anything else on the heap.