How Does Dynamic Heap Storage Have Something to Do with Heap?

Question

There are three typical ways to allocate memory for programs: static, stack and dynamic heap. However, when I look at the implementation of dynamic heap memory allocation from wikipedia , what I found is fixed block allocation, etc. So why is dynamic memory allocation called "heap" memory allocation? How does it have something to do with "heap"?

Answer 1

Heap memory and the heap data structure are two different and unrelated things. This really bothered me when I was learning about memory, especially since stack memory was actually a stack. The original use of the word heap in computer science referred to the data structure. However, in the 1970s some authors began to use the word heap to refer to the pool of available memory. This use actually more closely matches the English definition of heap - an untidy collection of things - since heap memory is a messy place to allocate and deallocate memory. The name stuck and now we have multiple meanings for the word heap.