Why should C programmers minimize use of new

Question

I stumbled upon Stack Overflow question Memory leak with std  string when using std  list lt std  string gt   and one of the comments says this      Stop using new so much  I can t see any reason you used new anywhere   you did  You can create objects by value in C   and it s one of the   huge advantages to using the language      You do not have to allocate   everything on the heap      Stop thinking like a Java programmer    I m not really sure what he means by that       Why should objects be created by value in C   as often as possible  and what difference does it make internally    Did I misinterpret the answer

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I tend to disagree with the idea of using new "too much". Though the original poster's use of new with system classes is a bit ridiculous. (int *i; i = new int[9999];? really? int i[9999]; is much clearer.) I think that is what was getting the commenter's goat.

When you're working with system objects, it's very rare that you'd need more than one reference to the exact same object. As long as the value is the same, that's all that matters. And system objects don't typically take up much space in memory. (one byte per character, in a string). And if they do, the libraries should be designed to take that memory management into account (if they're written well). In these cases, (all but one or two of the news in his code), new is practically pointless and only serves to introduce confusions and potential for bugs.

When you're working with your own classes/objects, however (e.g. the original poster's Line class), then you have to begin thinking about the issues like memory footprint, persistence of data, etc. yourself. At this point, allowing multiple references to the same value is invaluable - it allows for constructs like linked lists, dictionaries, and graphs, where multiple variables need to not only have the same value, but reference the exact same object in memory. However, the Line class doesn't have any of those requirements. So the original poster's code actually has absolutely no needs for new.

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new is the new goto   Recall why goto is so reviled  while it is a powerful  low-level tool for flow control  people often used it in unnecessarily complicated ways that made code difficult to follow  Furthermore  the most useful and easiest to read patterns were encoded in structured programming statements  e g  for or while   the ultimate effect is that the code where goto is the appropriate way to is rather rare  if you are tempted to write goto  you re probably doing things badly  unless you really know what you re doing    new is similar  mdash  it is often used to make things unnecessarily complicated and harder to read  and the most useful usage patterns can be encoded have been encoded into various classes  Furthermore  if you need to use any new usage patterns for which there aren t already standard classes  you can write your own classes that encode them   I would even argue that new is worse than goto  due to the need to pair new and delete statements   Like goto  if you ever think you need to use new  you are probably doing things badly  mdash  especially if you are doing so outside of the implementation of a class whose purpose in life is to encapsulate whatever dynamic allocations you need to do

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Because the stack is faster and leak-proof  In C    it takes but a single instruction to allocate space -- on the stack -- for every local scope object in a given function  and it s impossible to leak any of that memory  That comment intended  or should have intended  to say something like  use the stack and not the heap

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The reason why is complicated   First  C   is not garbage collected  Therefore  for every new  there must be a corresponding delete  If you fail to put this delete in  then you have a memory leak  Now  for a simple case like this   std  string  someString   new std  string         Do stuff delete someString    This is simple  But what happens if  Do stuff  throws an exception  Oops  memory leak  What happens if  Do stuff  issues return early  Oops  memory leak   And this is for the simplest case  If you happen to return that string to someone  now they have to delete it  And if they pass it as an argument  does the person receiving it need to delete it  When should they delete it   Or  you can just do this   std  string someString         Do stuff   No delete  The object was created on the  stack   and it will be destroyed once it goes out of scope  You can even return the object  thus transfering its contents to the calling function  You can pass the object to functions  typically as a reference or const-reference  void SomeFunc std  string  amp iCanModifyThis  const std  string  amp iCantModifyThis   And so forth   All without new and delete  There s no question of who owns the memory or who s responsible for deleting it  If you do   std  string someString       std  string otherString  otherString   someString    It is understood that otherString has a copy of the data of someString  It isn t a pointer  it is a separate object  They may happen to have the same contents  but you can change one without affecting the other   someString     More text    if otherString    someString      Will never get here        See the idea

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One more point to all the above correct answers  it depends on what sort of programming you are doing  Kernel developing in Windows for example -  The stack is severely limited and you might not be able to take page faults like in user mode   In such environments  new  or C-like API calls are prefered and even required   Of course  this is merely an exception to the rule

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To a great extent  that s someone elevating their own weaknesses to a general rule   There s nothing wrong per se with creating objects using the new operator   What there is some argument for is that you have to do so with some discipline  if you create an object you need to make sure it s going to be destroyed   The easiest way of doing that is to create the object in automatic storage  so C   knows to destroy it when it goes out of scope          File foo   File  foo dat            do things       Now  observe that when you fall off that block after the end-brace  foo is out of scope   C   will call its dtor automatically for you   Unlike Java  you don t need to wait for the GC to find it     Had you written          File   foo   new File  foo dat      you would want to match it explicitly with       delete foo        or even better  allocate your File   as a  smart pointer    If you aren t careful about that it can lead to leaks   The answer itself makes the mistaken assumption that if you don t use new you don t allocate on the heap  in fact  in C   you don t know that   At most  you know that a small amout of memory  say one pointer  is certainly allocated on the stack   However  consider if the implementation of File is something like    class File       private        FileImpl   fd      public        File String fn   fd   new FileImpl fn      then FileImpl will still be allocated on the stack   And yes  you d better be sure to have        File    delete fd       in the class as well  without it  you ll leak memory from the heap even if you didn t apparently allocate on the heap at all

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Objects created by new must be eventually deleted lest they leak  The destructor won t be called  memory won t be freed  the whole bit  Since C   has no garbage collection  it s a problem   Objects created by value  i  e  on stack  automatically die when they go out of scope  The destructor call is inserted by the compiler  and the memory is auto-freed upon function return   Smart pointers like unique ptr  shared ptr solve the dangling reference problem  but they require coding discipline and have other potential issues  copyability  reference loops  etc     Also  in heavily multithreaded scenarios  new is a point of contention between threads  there can be a performance impact for overusing new  Stack object creation is by definition thread-local  since each thread has its own stack   The downside of value objects is that they die once the host function returns - you cannot pass a reference to those back to the caller  only by copying  returning or moving by value

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new allocates objects on the heap   Otherwise  objects are allocated on the stack   Look up the difference between the two

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When you use new  objects are allocated to the heap  It is generally used when you anticipate expansion  When you declare an object such as   Class var    it is placed on the stack   You will always have to call destroy on the object that you placed on the heap with new  This opens the potential for memory leaks  Objects placed on the stack are not prone to memory leaking

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new   shouldn t be used as little as possible  It should be used as carefully as possible  And it should be used as often as necessary as dictated by pragmatism   Allocation of objects on the stack  relying on their implicit destruction  is a simple model  If the required scope of an object fits that model then there s no need to use new    with the associated delete   and checking of NULL pointers  In the case where you have lots of short-lived objects allocation on the stack should reduce the problems of heap fragmentation   However  if the lifetime of your object needs to extend beyond the current scope then new   is the right answer  Just make sure that you pay attention to when and how you call delete   and the possibilities of NULL pointers  using deleted objects and all of the other gotchas that come with the use of pointers

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I see that a few important reasons for doing as few new s as possible are missed   Operator new has a non-deterministic execution time  Calling new may or may not cause the OS to allocate a new physical page to your process this can be quite slow if you do it often  Or it may already have a suitable memory location ready  we don t know  If your program needs to have consistent and predictable execution time  like in a real-time system or game physics simulation  you need to avoid new in your time critical loops   Operator new is an implicit thread synchronization  Yes you heard me  your OS needs to make sure your page tables are consistent and as such calling new will cause your thread to acquire an implicit mutex lock  If you are consistently calling new from many threads you are actually serialising your threads  I ve done this with 32 CPUs  each hitting on new to get a few hundred bytes each  ouch  that was a royal p i t a  to debug   The rest such as slow  fragmentation  error prone  etc have already been mentioned by other answers

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C   doesn t employ any memory manager by its own  Other languages like C   Java has garbage collector to handle the memory C   implementations typically use operating system routines to allocate the memory and too much new delete could fragment the available memory With any application  if the memory is frequently being used it s advisable to pre-allocate it and release when not required  Improper memory management could lead memory leaks and it s really hard to track  So using stack objects within the scope of function is a proven technique The downside of using stack objects are  it creates multiple copies of objects on returning  passing to functions etc  However smart compilers are well aware of these situations and they ve been optimized well for performance It s really tedious in C   if the memory being allocated and released in two different places  The responsibility for release is always a question and mostly we rely on some commonly accessible pointers  stack objects  maximum possible  and techniques like auto ptr  RAII objects  The best thing is that  you ve control over the memory and the worst thing is that you will not have any control over the memory if we employ an improper memory management for the application  The crashes caused due to memory corruptions are the nastiest and hard to trace

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The core reason is that objects on heap are always difficult to use and manage than simple values  Writing code that are easy to read and maintain is always the first priority of any serious programmer   Another scenario is the library we are using provides value semantics and make dynamic allocation unnecessary  Std  string is a good example   For object oriented code however  using a pointer - which means use new to create it beforehand - is a must  In order to simplify the complexity of resource management  we have dozens of tools to make it as simple as possible  such as smart pointers  The object based paradigm or generic paradigm assumes value semantics and requires less or no new  just as  the posters elsewhere stated   Traditional design patterns  especially those mentioned in GoF book  use new a lot  as they are typical OO code

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I think the poster meant to say You do not have to allocate everything on theheap rather than the the stack   Basically objects are allocated on the stack  if the object size allows  of course  because of the cheap cost of stack-allocation  rather than heap-based allocation which involves quite some work by the allocator  and adds verbosity because then you have to manage data allocated on the heap

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There are two widely-used memory allocation techniques  automatic allocation and dynamic allocation   Commonly  there is a corresponding region of memory for each  the stack and the heap  Stack The stack always allocates memory in a sequential fashion   It can do so because it requires you to release the memory in the reverse order  First-In  Last-Out  FILO    This is the memory allocation technique for local variables in many programming languages   It is very  very fast because it requires minimal bookkeeping and the next address to allocate is implicit  In C    this is called automatic storage because the storage is claimed automatically at the end of scope   As soon as execution of current code block  delimited using     is completed  memory for all variables in that block is automatically collected   This is also the moment where destructors are invoked to clean up resources  Heap The heap allows for a more flexible memory allocation mode   Bookkeeping is more complex and allocation is slower   Because there is no implicit release point  you must release the memory manually  using delete or delete    free in C    However  the absence of an implicit release point is the key to the heap s flexibility  Reasons to use dynamic allocation Even if using the heap is slower and potentially leads to memory leaks or memory fragmentation  there are perfectly good use cases for dynamic allocation  as it s less limited  Two key reasons to use dynamic allocation   You don t know how much memory you need at compile time   For instance  when reading a text file into a string  you usually don t know what size the file has  so you can t decide how much memory to allocate until you run the program   You want to allocate memory which will persist after leaving the current block   For instance  you may want to write a function string readfile string path  that returns the contents of a file   In this case  even if the stack could hold the entire file contents  you could not return from a function and keep the allocated memory block    Why dynamic allocation is often unnecessary In C   there s a neat construct called a destructor   This mechanism allows you to manage resources by aligning the lifetime of the resource with the lifetime of a variable  This technique is called RAII and is the distinguishing point of C    It  quot wraps quot  resources into objects   std  string is a perfect example   This snippet  int main   int argc  char  argv           std  string program argv 0       actually allocates a variable amount of memory   The std  string object allocates memory using the heap and releases it in its destructor   In this case  you did not need to manually manage any resources and still got the benefits of dynamic memory allocation  In particular  it implies that in this snippet  int main   int argc  char  argv           std  string   program   new std  string argv 0        Bad      delete program     there is unneeded dynamic memory allocation   The program requires more typing     and introduces the risk of forgetting to deallocate the memory   It does this with no apparent benefit  Why you should use automatic storage as often as possible Basically  the last paragraph sums it up   Using automatic storage as often as possible makes your programs   faster to type  faster when run  less prone to memory resource leaks   Bonus points In the referenced question  there are additional concerns   In particular  the following class  class Line   public      Line         Line        std  string  mString      Line  Line         mString   new std  string  quot foo bar quot       Line   Line         delete mString     Is actually a lot more risky to use than the following one  class Line   public      Line        std  string mString      Line  Line         mString    quot foo bar quot          note  there is a cleaner way to write this     The reason is that std  string properly defines a copy constructor   Consider the following program  int main          Line l1      Line l2   l1     Using the original version  this program will likely crash  as it uses delete on the same string twice   Using the modified version  each Line instance will own its own string instance  each with its own memory and both will be released at the end of the program  Other notes Extensive use of RAII is considered a best practice in C   because of all the reasons above   However  there is an additional benefit which is not immediately obvious   Basically  it s better than the sum of its parts   The whole mechanism composes   It scales  If you use the Line class as a building block   class Table          Line borders 4        Then  int main            Table table      allocates four std  string instances  four Line instances  one Table instance and all the string s contents and everything is freed automagically

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Pre-C  17  Because it is prone to subtle leaks even if you wrap the result in a smart pointer  Consider a  quot careful quot  user who remembers to wrap objects in smart pointers  foo shared ptr lt T1 gt  new T1     shared ptr lt T2 gt  new T2       This code is dangerous because there is no guarantee that either shared ptr is constructed before either T1 or T2  Hence  if one of new T1   or new T2   fails after the other succeeds  then the first object will be leaked because no shared ptr exists to destroy and deallocate it  Solution  use make shared  Post-C  17  This is no longer a problem  C  17 imposes a constraint on the order of these operations  in this case ensuring that each call to new   must be immediately followed by the construction of the corresponding smart pointer  with no other operation in between  This implies that  by the time the second new   is called  it is guaranteed that the first object has already been wrapped in its smart pointer  thus preventing any leaks in case an exception is thrown  A more detailed explanation of the new evaluation order introduced by C  17 was provided by Barry in another answer  Thanks to  Remy Lebeau for pointing out that this is still a problem under C  17  although less so   the shared ptr constructor can fail to allocate its control block and throw  in which case the pointer passed to it is not deleted  Solution  use make shared

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One notable reason to avoid overusing the heap is for performance -- specifically involving the performance of the default memory management mechanism used by C    While allocation can be quite quick in the trivial case  doing a lot of new and delete on objects of non-uniform size without strict order leads not only to memory fragmentation  but it also complicates the allocation algorithm and can absolutely destroy performance in certain cases   That s the problem that memory pools where created to solve  allowing to to mitigate the inherent disadvantages of traditional heap implementations  while still allowing you to use the heap as necessary   Better still  though  to avoid the problem altogether  If you can put it on the stack  then do so

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Two reasons    It s unnecessary in this case  You re making your code needlessly more complicated  It allocates space on the heap  and it means that you have to remember to delete it later  or it will cause a memory leak

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