Can anyone explain why the pool of memory managed by malloc()
/ free()
is called a heap?
Based on [1]: http://www.google.com/url?q=http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHaQLotbBKKwYqxiiYWN1146BWzFw "Doug Lea's explanation of how his malloc() works", it's not obvious that the data structure which we call a "heap" is being used at all.
Do we call it a "heap" because it's common for malloc()
implementations to use best-fit selection of the memory chunk to return, and that's historically been implemented using a min-heap of chunks, sorted by chunk size?