When is memory allocated using malloc released?

Memory allocated with malloc is specifically dynamic memory allocation in C, which means it is managed manually by the programmer. When you allocate memory using malloc, you are responsible for releasing that memory yourself. This is done using the free() function, which deallocates the memory that was previously allocated with malloc.

This manual management is essential because failure to release the allocated memory can lead to memory leaks, where the program consumes more and more memory over time, ultimately exhausting available memory resources.

In contrast, automatic cleanup mechanisms apply in different contexts, such as stack memory that gets released when variables go out of scope (as with local variables in functions), but this does not apply to memory allocated with malloc. Options that suggest automatic memory release, therefore, do not pertain to the use of malloc. The option referring to delete() is associated with C++ and is not applicable to C, reinforcing that malloc and free() are the correct methods to manage memory allocation and deallocation in C programming.