Heap allocation

[Troy ENGLISH]

I am going to be doing work on different approaches to memory management
of the heap. While I have theoretical ideas to implement, list
structures etc... I don't know how to go about defining and playing with
the heap in C. The commands and syntax's used must be very portable as
well. My knowledge of C itself is quite limited so I would appreciate
verbose responses. Basically the goal in the end is to write faster and
more efficient versions of malloc and free ant their variants ie calloc
etc...

Thanks.
Troy.
troye at bart.cs.mcgill.ca