General guidelines to avoid memory leaks in C

Question

What are some general tips to make sure I don t leak memory in C   programs  How do I figure out who should free memory that has been dynamically allocated

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There s already a lot about how to not leak  but if you need a tool to help you track leaks take a look at    BoundsChecker under VS  MMGR C C   lib from FluidStudio http   www paulnettle com pub FluidStudios MemoryManagers Fluid Studios Memory Manager zip  its overrides the allocation methods and creates a report of the allocations  leaks  etc

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You can intercept the memory allocation functions and see if there are some memory zones not freed upon program exit  though it is not suitable for all the applications    It can also be done at compile time by replacing operators new and delete and other memory allocation functions   For example check in this site  Debugging memory allocation in C    Note  There is a trick for delete operator also something like this    define DEBUG DELETE PrepareDelete   LINE     FILE     delete  define delete DEBUG DELETE   You can store in some variables the name of the file and when the overloaded delete operator will know which was the place it was called from  This way you can have the trace of every delete and malloc from your program  At the end of the memory checking sequence you should be able to report what allocated block of memory was not  deleted  identifying it by filename and line number which is I guess what you want   You could also try something like BoundsChecker under Visual Studio which is pretty interesting and easy to use

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If you can  use boost shared ptr and standard C   auto ptr   Those convey ownership semantics   When you return an auto ptr  you are telling the caller that you are giving them ownership of the memory   When you return a shared ptr  you are telling the caller that you have a reference to it and they take part of the ownership  but it isn t solely their responsibility   These semantics also apply to parameters   If the caller passes you an auto ptr  they are giving you ownership

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I thoroughly endorse all the advice about RAII and smart pointers  but I d also like to add a slightly higher-level tip  the easiest memory to manage is the memory you never allocated  Unlike languages like C  and Java  where pretty much everything is a reference  in C   you should put objects on the stack whenever you can  As I ve see several people  including Dr Stroustrup  point out  the main reason why garbage collection has never been popular in C   is that well-written C   doesn t produce much garbage in the first place   Don t write  Object  x   new Object    or even  shared ptr lt Object gt  x new Object     when you can just write  Object x

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valgrind  only avail for  nix platforms  is a very nice memory checker

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You can intercept the memory allocation functions and see if there are some memory zones not freed upon program exit  though it is not suitable for all the applications    It can also be done at compile time by replacing operators new and delete and other memory allocation functions   For example check in this site  Debugging memory allocation in C    Note  There is a trick for delete operator also something like this    define DEBUG DELETE PrepareDelete   LINE     FILE     delete  define delete DEBUG DELETE   You can store in some variables the name of the file and when the overloaded delete operator will know which was the place it was called from  This way you can have the trace of every delete and malloc from your program  At the end of the memory checking sequence you should be able to report what allocated block of memory was not  deleted  identifying it by filename and line number which is I guess what you want   You could also try something like BoundsChecker under Visual Studio which is pretty interesting and easy to use

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Manage memory the same way you manage other resources  handles  files  db connections  sockets      GC would not help you with them either

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One technique that has become popular with memory management in C   is RAII   Basically you use constructors destructors to handle resource allocation   Of course there are some other obnoxious details in C   due to exception safety  but the basic idea is pretty simple   The issue generally comes down to one of ownership   I highly recommend reading the Effective C   series by Scott Meyers and Modern C   Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

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Others have mentioned ways of avoiding memory leaks in the first place  like smart pointers    But a profiling and memory-analysis tool is often the only way to track down memory problems once you have them   Valgrind memcheck is an excellent free one

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You ll want to look at smart pointers  such as boost s smart pointers   Instead of   int main          Object  obj   new Object                  delete obj      boost  shared ptr will automatically delete once the reference count is zero   int main         boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object                      destructor destroys when reference count is zero     Note my last note   when reference count is zero  which is the coolest part  So If you have multiple users of your object  you won t have to keep track of whether the object is still in use  Once nobody refers to your shared pointer  it gets destroyed   This is not a panacea  however  Though you can access the base pointer  you wouldn t want to pass it to a 3rd party API unless you were confident with what it was doing  Lots of times  your  posting  stuff to some other thread for work to be done AFTER the creating scope is finished  This is common with PostThreadMessage in Win32   void foo        boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object             Simplified here    PostThreadMessage        LPARAM ob get           Destructor destroys  pointer sent to PostThreadMessage is invalid  Zohnoes      As always  use your thinking cap with any tool

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If you are going to manage your memory manually  you have two cases    I created the object  perhaps indirectly  by calling a function that allocates a new object   I use it  or a function I call uses it   then I free it  Somebody gave me the reference  so I should not free it    If you need to break any of these rules  please document it   It is all about pointer ownership

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Others have mentioned ways of avoiding memory leaks in the first place  like smart pointers    But a profiling and memory-analysis tool is often the only way to track down memory problems once you have them   Valgrind memcheck is an excellent free one

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Others have mentioned ways of avoiding memory leaks in the first place  like smart pointers    But a profiling and memory-analysis tool is often the only way to track down memory problems once you have them   Valgrind memcheck is an excellent free one

User · Answer

If you can  use boost shared ptr and standard C   auto ptr   Those convey ownership semantics   When you return an auto ptr  you are telling the caller that you are giving them ownership of the memory   When you return a shared ptr  you are telling the caller that you have a reference to it and they take part of the ownership  but it isn t solely their responsibility   These semantics also apply to parameters   If the caller passes you an auto ptr  they are giving you ownership

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One technique that has become popular with memory management in C   is RAII   Basically you use constructors destructors to handle resource allocation   Of course there are some other obnoxious details in C   due to exception safety  but the basic idea is pretty simple   The issue generally comes down to one of ownership   I highly recommend reading the Effective C   series by Scott Meyers and Modern C   Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

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Manage memory the same way you manage other resources  handles  files  db connections  sockets      GC would not help you with them either

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Exactly one return from any function  That way you can do deallocation there and never miss it   It s too easy to make a mistake otherwise   new a   if  Bad     delete a  return   new b   if  Bad     delete a  delete b  return          etc

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For MSVC only  add the following to the top of each  cpp file    ifdef  DEBUG  define new DEBUG NEW  endif   Then  when debugging with VS2003 or greater  you will be told of any leaks when your program exits  it tracks new delete    It s basic  but it has helped me in the past

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Also  don t use manually allocated memory if there s a std library class  e g  vector    Make sure if you violate that rule that you have a virtual destructor

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valgrind is a good tool to check your programs memory leakages at runtime  too   It is available on most flavors of Linux  including Android  and on Darwin   If you use to write unit tests for your programs  you should get in the habit of systematicaly running valgrind on tests  It will potentially avoid many memory leaks at an early stage  It is also usually easier to pinpoint them in simple tests that in a full software    Of course this advice stay valid for any other memory check tool

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valgrind  only avail for  nix platforms  is a very nice memory checker

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Exactly one return from any function  That way you can do deallocation there and never miss it   It s too easy to make a mistake otherwise   new a   if  Bad     delete a  return   new b   if  Bad     delete a  delete b  return          etc

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If you can t don t use a smart pointer for something  although that should be a huge red flag   type in your code with   allocate if allocation succeeded      scope       deallocate       That s obvious  but make sure you type it before you type any code in the scope

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A frequent source of these bugs is when you have a method that accepts a reference or pointer to an object but leaves ownership unclear   Style and commenting conventions can make this less likely   Let the case where the function takes ownership of the object be the special case   In all situations where this happens  be sure to write a comment next to the function in the header file indicating this   You should strive to make sure that in most cases the module or class which allocates an object is also responsible for deallocating it   Using const can help a lot in some cases   If a function will not modify an object  and does not store a reference to it that persists after it returns  accept a const reference   From reading the caller s code it will be obvious that your function has not accepted ownership of the object   You could have had the same function accept a non-const pointer  and the caller may or may not have assumed that the callee accepted ownership  but with a const reference there s no question   Do not use non-const references in argument lists   It is very unclear when reading the caller code that the callee may have kept a reference to the parameter   I disagree with the comments recommending reference counted pointers   This usually works fine  but when you have a bug and it doesn t work  especially if your destructor does something non-trivial  such as in a multithreaded program   Definitely try to adjust your design to not need reference counting if it s not too hard

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We wrap all our allocation functions with a layer that appends a brief string at the front and a sentinel flag at the end  So for example you d have a call to  myalloc  pszSomeString  iSize  iAlignment    or new   description   iSize   MyObject    which internally allocates the specified size plus enough space for your header and sentinel  Of course  don t forget to comment this out for non-debug builds  It takes a little more memory to do this but the benefits far outweigh the costs    This has three benefits - first it allows you to easily and quickly track what code is leaking  by doing quick searches for code allocated in certain  zones  but not cleaned up when those zones should have freed  It can also be useful to detect when a boundary has been overwritten by checking to ensure all sentinels are intact  This has saved us numerous times when trying to find those well-hidden crashes or array missteps  The third benefit is in tracking the use of memory to see who the big players are - a collation of certain descriptions in a MemDump tells you when  sound  is taking up way more space than you anticipated  for example

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You can intercept the memory allocation functions and see if there are some memory zones not freed upon program exit  though it is not suitable for all the applications    It can also be done at compile time by replacing operators new and delete and other memory allocation functions   For example check in this site  Debugging memory allocation in C    Note  There is a trick for delete operator also something like this    define DEBUG DELETE PrepareDelete   LINE     FILE     delete  define delete DEBUG DELETE   You can store in some variables the name of the file and when the overloaded delete operator will know which was the place it was called from  This way you can have the trace of every delete and malloc from your program  At the end of the memory checking sequence you should be able to report what allocated block of memory was not  deleted  identifying it by filename and line number which is I guess what you want   You could also try something like BoundsChecker under Visual Studio which is pretty interesting and easy to use

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Use RAII   Forget Garbage Collection  Use RAII instead   Note that even the Garbage Collector can leak  too  if you forget to  null  some references in Java C    and that Garbage Collector won t help you to dispose of resources  if you have an object which acquired a handle to a file  the file won t be freed automatically when the object will go out of scope if you don t do it manually in Java  or use the  dispose  pattern in C    Forget the  one return per function  rule  This is a good C advice to avoid leaks  but it is outdated in C   because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead   And while the  Sandwich Pattern  is a good C advice  it is outdated in C    because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead     This post seem to be repetitive  but in C    the most basic pattern to know is RAII   Learn to use smart pointers  both from boost  TR1 or even the lowly  but often efficient enough  auto ptr  but you must know its limitations    RAII is the basis of both exception safety and resource disposal in C    and no other pattern  sandwich  etc   will give you both  and most of the time  it will give you none    See below a comparison of RAII and non RAII code   void doSandwich        T   p   new T           do something with p    delete p      leak if the p processing throws or return    void doRAIIDynamic        std  auto ptr lt T gt  p new T         you can use other smart pointers  too       do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc     void doRAIIStatic        T p         do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc      About RAII  To summarize  after the comment from Ogre Psalm33   RAII relies on three concepts    Once the object is constructed  it just works  Do acquire resources in the constructor  Object destruction is enough  Do free resources in the destructor  It s all about scopes  Scoped objects  see doRAIIStatic example above  will be constructed at their declaration  and will be destroyed the moment the execution exits the scope  no matter how the exit  return  break  exception  etc      This means that in correct C   code  most objects won t be constructed with new  and will be declared on the stack instead  And for those constructed using new  all will be somehow scoped  e g  attached to a smart pointer    As a developer  this is very powerful indeed as you won t need to care about manual resource handling  as done in C  or for some objects in Java which makes intensive use of try finally for that case      Edit  2012-02-12       scoped objects     will be destructed     no matter the exit  that s not entirely true  there are ways to cheat RAII  any flavour of terminate   will bypass cleanup  exit EXIT SUCCESS  is an oxymoron in this regard           wilhelmtell   wilhelmtell is quite right about that  There are exceptional ways to cheat RAII  all leading to the process abrupt stop   Those are exceptional ways because C   code is not littered with terminate  exit  etc   or in the case with exceptions  we do want an unhandled exception to crash the process and core dump its memory image as is  and not after cleaning   But we must still know about those cases because  while they rarely happen  they can still happen    who calls terminate or exit in casual C   code     I remember having to deal with that problem when playing with GLUT  This library is very C-oriented  going as far as actively designing it to make things difficult for C   developers like not caring about stack allocated data  or having  interesting  decisions about never returning from their main loop    I won t comment about that

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You ll want to look at smart pointers  such as boost s smart pointers   Instead of   int main          Object  obj   new Object                  delete obj      boost  shared ptr will automatically delete once the reference count is zero   int main         boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object                      destructor destroys when reference count is zero     Note my last note   when reference count is zero  which is the coolest part  So If you have multiple users of your object  you won t have to keep track of whether the object is still in use  Once nobody refers to your shared pointer  it gets destroyed   This is not a panacea  however  Though you can access the base pointer  you wouldn t want to pass it to a 3rd party API unless you were confident with what it was doing  Lots of times  your  posting  stuff to some other thread for work to be done AFTER the creating scope is finished  This is common with PostThreadMessage in Win32   void foo        boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object             Simplified here    PostThreadMessage        LPARAM ob get           Destructor destroys  pointer sent to PostThreadMessage is invalid  Zohnoes      As always  use your thinking cap with any tool

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One of the only examples about allocating and destroying in different places is thread creation  the parameter you pass   But even in this case is easy  Here is the function method creating a thread   struct myparams   int x  std  vector lt double gt  z     std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param new myparams x            Release the ownership in case thread creation is successfull if  0    pthread create  amp th  NULL  th func  param get    param release          Here instead the thread function  extern  C  void  th func void  p       try          std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param  myparams  p                   catch                return 0      Pretty easyn isn t it  In case the thread creation fails the resource will be free d  deleted  by the auto ptr  otherwise the ownership will be passed to the thread  What if the thread is so fast that after creation it releases the resource before the  param release      gets called in the main function method  Nothing  Because we will  tell  the auto ptr to ignore the deallocation  Is C   memory management easy isn t it  Cheers   Ema

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If you are going to manage your memory manually  you have two cases    I created the object  perhaps indirectly  by calling a function that allocates a new object   I use it  or a function I call uses it   then I free it  Somebody gave me the reference  so I should not free it    If you need to break any of these rules  please document it   It is all about pointer ownership

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Tips in order of Importance   -Tip 1 Always remember to declare your destructors  virtual    -Tip 2 Use RAII  -Tip 3 Use boost s smartpointers  -Tip 4 Don t write your own buggy Smartpointers  use boost  on a project I m on right now I can t use boost  and I ve suffered having to debug my own smart pointers  I would definately not take the same route again  but then again right now I can t add boost to our dependencies   -Tip 5 If its some casual non-performance critical  as in games with thousands of objects  work look at Thorsten Ottosen s boost pointer container  -Tip 6 Find a leak detection header for your platform of choice such as Visual Leak Detection s  vld  header

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C   is designed RAII in mind  There is really no better way to manage memory in C   I think  But be careful not to allocate very big chunks  like buffer objects  on local scope  It can cause stack overflows and  if there is a flaw in bounds checking while using that chunk  you can overwrite other variables or return addresses  which leads to all kinds security holes

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Most memory leaks are the result of not being clear about object ownership and lifetime   The first thing to do is to allocate on the Stack whenever you can  This deals with most of the cases where you need to allocate a single object for some purpose   If you do need to  new  an object then most of the time it will have a single obvious owner for the rest of its lifetime  For this situation I tend to use a bunch of collections templates that are designed for  owning  objects stored in them by pointer  They are implemented with the STL vector and map containers but have some differences    These collections can not be copied or assigned to   once they contain objects   Pointers to objects are inserted into them  When the collection is deleted the destructor is first called on all objects in the collection   I have another version where it asserts if destructed and not empty   Since they store pointers you can also store inherited objects in these containers    My beaf with STL is that it is so focused on Value objects while in most applications objects are unique entities that do not have meaningful copy semantics required for use in those containers

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Tips in order of Importance   -Tip 1 Always remember to declare your destructors  virtual    -Tip 2 Use RAII  -Tip 3 Use boost s smartpointers  -Tip 4 Don t write your own buggy Smartpointers  use boost  on a project I m on right now I can t use boost  and I ve suffered having to debug my own smart pointers  I would definately not take the same route again  but then again right now I can t add boost to our dependencies   -Tip 5 If its some casual non-performance critical  as in games with thousands of objects  work look at Thorsten Ottosen s boost pointer container  -Tip 6 Find a leak detection header for your platform of choice such as Visual Leak Detection s  vld  header

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A frequent source of these bugs is when you have a method that accepts a reference or pointer to an object but leaves ownership unclear   Style and commenting conventions can make this less likely   Let the case where the function takes ownership of the object be the special case   In all situations where this happens  be sure to write a comment next to the function in the header file indicating this   You should strive to make sure that in most cases the module or class which allocates an object is also responsible for deallocating it   Using const can help a lot in some cases   If a function will not modify an object  and does not store a reference to it that persists after it returns  accept a const reference   From reading the caller s code it will be obvious that your function has not accepted ownership of the object   You could have had the same function accept a non-const pointer  and the caller may or may not have assumed that the callee accepted ownership  but with a const reference there s no question   Do not use non-const references in argument lists   It is very unclear when reading the caller code that the callee may have kept a reference to the parameter   I disagree with the comments recommending reference counted pointers   This usually works fine  but when you have a bug and it doesn t work  especially if your destructor does something non-trivial  such as in a multithreaded program   Definitely try to adjust your design to not need reference counting if it s not too hard

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Exactly one return from any function  That way you can do deallocation there and never miss it   It s too easy to make a mistake otherwise   new a   if  Bad     delete a  return   new b   if  Bad     delete a  delete b  return          etc

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Try to avoid allocating objects dynamically  As long as classes have appropriate constructors and destructors  use a variable of the class type  not a pointer to it  and you avoid dynamical allocation and deallocation because the compiler will do it for you  Actually that s also the mechanism used by  smart pointers  and referred to as RAII by some of the other writers  -     When you pass objects to other functions  prefer reference parameters over pointers  This avoids some possible errors  Declare parameters const  where possible  especially pointers to objects  That way objects can t be freed  accidentially   except if you cast the const away  -       Minimize the number of places in the program where you do memory allocation and deallocation  E  g  if you do allocate or free the same type several times  write a function for it  or a factory method  -    This way you can create debug output  which addresses are allocated and deallocated       easily  if required  Use a factory function to allocate objects of several related classes from a single function    If your classes have a common base class with a virtual destructor  you can free all of them using the same function  or static method   Check your program with tools like purify  unfortunately many

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Instead of managing memory manually  try to use smart pointers where applicable  Take a look at the Boost lib  TR1  and smart pointers  Also smart pointers are now a part of C   standard called C  11

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Great question   if you are using c   and you are developing real-time CPU-and-memory boud application  like games  you need to write your own Memory Manager   I think the better you can do is merge some interesting works of various authors  I can give you some hint    Fixed size allocator is heavily discussed  everywhere in the net Small Object Allocation was introduced by Alexandrescu in 2001 in his perfect book  Modern c   design  A great advancement  with source code distributed  can be found in an amazing article in Game Programming Gem 7  2008  named  High Performance Heap allocator  written by Dimitar Lazarov A great list of resources can be found in this article   Do not start writing a noob unuseful allocator by yourself    DOCUMENT YOURSELF first

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One of the only examples about allocating and destroying in different places is thread creation  the parameter you pass   But even in this case is easy  Here is the function method creating a thread   struct myparams   int x  std  vector lt double gt  z     std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param new myparams x            Release the ownership in case thread creation is successfull if  0    pthread create  amp th  NULL  th func  param get    param release          Here instead the thread function  extern  C  void  th func void  p       try          std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param  myparams  p                   catch                return 0      Pretty easyn isn t it  In case the thread creation fails the resource will be free d  deleted  by the auto ptr  otherwise the ownership will be passed to the thread  What if the thread is so fast that after creation it releases the resource before the  param release      gets called in the main function method  Nothing  Because we will  tell  the auto ptr to ignore the deallocation  Is C   memory management easy isn t it  Cheers   Ema

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One of the only examples about allocating and destroying in different places is thread creation  the parameter you pass   But even in this case is easy  Here is the function method creating a thread   struct myparams   int x  std  vector lt double gt  z     std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param new myparams x            Release the ownership in case thread creation is successfull if  0    pthread create  amp th  NULL  th func  param get    param release          Here instead the thread function  extern  C  void  th func void  p       try          std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param  myparams  p                   catch                return 0      Pretty easyn isn t it  In case the thread creation fails the resource will be free d  deleted  by the auto ptr  otherwise the ownership will be passed to the thread  What if the thread is so fast that after creation it releases the resource before the  param release      gets called in the main function method  Nothing  Because we will  tell  the auto ptr to ignore the deallocation  Is C   memory management easy isn t it  Cheers   Ema

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You can intercept the memory allocation functions and see if there are some memory zones not freed upon program exit  though it is not suitable for all the applications    It can also be done at compile time by replacing operators new and delete and other memory allocation functions   For example check in this site  Debugging memory allocation in C    Note  There is a trick for delete operator also something like this    define DEBUG DELETE PrepareDelete   LINE     FILE     delete  define delete DEBUG DELETE   You can store in some variables the name of the file and when the overloaded delete operator will know which was the place it was called from  This way you can have the trace of every delete and malloc from your program  At the end of the memory checking sequence you should be able to report what allocated block of memory was not  deleted  identifying it by filename and line number which is I guess what you want   You could also try something like BoundsChecker under Visual Studio which is pretty interesting and easy to use

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You ll want to look at smart pointers  such as boost s smart pointers   Instead of   int main          Object  obj   new Object                  delete obj      boost  shared ptr will automatically delete once the reference count is zero   int main         boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object                      destructor destroys when reference count is zero     Note my last note   when reference count is zero  which is the coolest part  So If you have multiple users of your object  you won t have to keep track of whether the object is still in use  Once nobody refers to your shared pointer  it gets destroyed   This is not a panacea  however  Though you can access the base pointer  you wouldn t want to pass it to a 3rd party API unless you were confident with what it was doing  Lots of times  your  posting  stuff to some other thread for work to be done AFTER the creating scope is finished  This is common with PostThreadMessage in Win32   void foo        boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object             Simplified here    PostThreadMessage        LPARAM ob get           Destructor destroys  pointer sent to PostThreadMessage is invalid  Zohnoes      As always  use your thinking cap with any tool

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User smart pointers everywhere you can   Whole classes of memory leaks just go away

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valgrind is a good tool to check your programs memory leakages at runtime  too   It is available on most flavors of Linux  including Android  and on Darwin   If you use to write unit tests for your programs  you should get in the habit of systematicaly running valgrind on tests  It will potentially avoid many memory leaks at an early stage  It is also usually easier to pinpoint them in simple tests that in a full software    Of course this advice stay valid for any other memory check tool

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C   is designed RAII in mind  There is really no better way to manage memory in C   I think  But be careful not to allocate very big chunks  like buffer objects  on local scope  It can cause stack overflows and  if there is a flaw in bounds checking while using that chunk  you can overwrite other variables or return addresses  which leads to all kinds security holes

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Manage memory the same way you manage other resources  handles  files  db connections  sockets      GC would not help you with them either

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Share and know memory ownership rules across your project  Using the COM rules makes for the best consistency   in  parameters are owned by the caller  callee must copy   out  params are owned by the caller  callee must make a copy if keeping a reference  etc

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Great question   if you are using c   and you are developing real-time CPU-and-memory boud application  like games  you need to write your own Memory Manager   I think the better you can do is merge some interesting works of various authors  I can give you some hint    Fixed size allocator is heavily discussed  everywhere in the net Small Object Allocation was introduced by Alexandrescu in 2001 in his perfect book  Modern c   design  A great advancement  with source code distributed  can be found in an amazing article in Game Programming Gem 7  2008  named  High Performance Heap allocator  written by Dimitar Lazarov A great list of resources can be found in this article   Do not start writing a noob unuseful allocator by yourself    DOCUMENT YOURSELF first

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Use RAII   Forget Garbage Collection  Use RAII instead   Note that even the Garbage Collector can leak  too  if you forget to  null  some references in Java C    and that Garbage Collector won t help you to dispose of resources  if you have an object which acquired a handle to a file  the file won t be freed automatically when the object will go out of scope if you don t do it manually in Java  or use the  dispose  pattern in C    Forget the  one return per function  rule  This is a good C advice to avoid leaks  but it is outdated in C   because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead   And while the  Sandwich Pattern  is a good C advice  it is outdated in C    because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead     This post seem to be repetitive  but in C    the most basic pattern to know is RAII   Learn to use smart pointers  both from boost  TR1 or even the lowly  but often efficient enough  auto ptr  but you must know its limitations    RAII is the basis of both exception safety and resource disposal in C    and no other pattern  sandwich  etc   will give you both  and most of the time  it will give you none    See below a comparison of RAII and non RAII code   void doSandwich        T   p   new T           do something with p    delete p      leak if the p processing throws or return    void doRAIIDynamic        std  auto ptr lt T gt  p new T         you can use other smart pointers  too       do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc     void doRAIIStatic        T p         do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc      About RAII  To summarize  after the comment from Ogre Psalm33   RAII relies on three concepts    Once the object is constructed  it just works  Do acquire resources in the constructor  Object destruction is enough  Do free resources in the destructor  It s all about scopes  Scoped objects  see doRAIIStatic example above  will be constructed at their declaration  and will be destroyed the moment the execution exits the scope  no matter how the exit  return  break  exception  etc      This means that in correct C   code  most objects won t be constructed with new  and will be declared on the stack instead  And for those constructed using new  all will be somehow scoped  e g  attached to a smart pointer    As a developer  this is very powerful indeed as you won t need to care about manual resource handling  as done in C  or for some objects in Java which makes intensive use of try finally for that case      Edit  2012-02-12       scoped objects     will be destructed     no matter the exit  that s not entirely true  there are ways to cheat RAII  any flavour of terminate   will bypass cleanup  exit EXIT SUCCESS  is an oxymoron in this regard           wilhelmtell   wilhelmtell is quite right about that  There are exceptional ways to cheat RAII  all leading to the process abrupt stop   Those are exceptional ways because C   code is not littered with terminate  exit  etc   or in the case with exceptions  we do want an unhandled exception to crash the process and core dump its memory image as is  and not after cleaning   But we must still know about those cases because  while they rarely happen  they can still happen    who calls terminate or exit in casual C   code     I remember having to deal with that problem when playing with GLUT  This library is very C-oriented  going as far as actively designing it to make things difficult for C   developers like not caring about stack allocated data  or having  interesting  decisions about never returning from their main loop    I won t comment about that

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One technique that has become popular with memory management in C   is RAII   Basically you use constructors destructors to handle resource allocation   Of course there are some other obnoxious details in C   due to exception safety  but the basic idea is pretty simple   The issue generally comes down to one of ownership   I highly recommend reading the Effective C   series by Scott Meyers and Modern C   Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

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Instead of managing memory manually  try to use smart pointers where applicable  Take a look at the Boost lib  TR1  and smart pointers  Also smart pointers are now a part of C   standard called C  11

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C   is designed RAII in mind  There is really no better way to manage memory in C   I think  But be careful not to allocate very big chunks  like buffer objects  on local scope  It can cause stack overflows and  if there is a flaw in bounds checking while using that chunk  you can overwrite other variables or return addresses  which leads to all kinds security holes

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We wrap all our allocation functions with a layer that appends a brief string at the front and a sentinel flag at the end  So for example you d have a call to  myalloc  pszSomeString  iSize  iAlignment    or new   description   iSize   MyObject    which internally allocates the specified size plus enough space for your header and sentinel  Of course  don t forget to comment this out for non-debug builds  It takes a little more memory to do this but the benefits far outweigh the costs    This has three benefits - first it allows you to easily and quickly track what code is leaking  by doing quick searches for code allocated in certain  zones  but not cleaned up when those zones should have freed  It can also be useful to detect when a boundary has been overwritten by checking to ensure all sentinels are intact  This has saved us numerous times when trying to find those well-hidden crashes or array missteps  The third benefit is in tracking the use of memory to see who the big players are - a collation of certain descriptions in a MemDump tells you when  sound  is taking up way more space than you anticipated  for example

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We wrap all our allocation functions with a layer that appends a brief string at the front and a sentinel flag at the end  So for example you d have a call to  myalloc  pszSomeString  iSize  iAlignment    or new   description   iSize   MyObject    which internally allocates the specified size plus enough space for your header and sentinel  Of course  don t forget to comment this out for non-debug builds  It takes a little more memory to do this but the benefits far outweigh the costs    This has three benefits - first it allows you to easily and quickly track what code is leaking  by doing quick searches for code allocated in certain  zones  but not cleaned up when those zones should have freed  It can also be useful to detect when a boundary has been overwritten by checking to ensure all sentinels are intact  This has saved us numerous times when trying to find those well-hidden crashes or array missteps  The third benefit is in tracking the use of memory to see who the big players are - a collation of certain descriptions in a MemDump tells you when  sound  is taking up way more space than you anticipated  for example

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I thoroughly endorse all the advice about RAII and smart pointers  but I d also like to add a slightly higher-level tip  the easiest memory to manage is the memory you never allocated  Unlike languages like C  and Java  where pretty much everything is a reference  in C   you should put objects on the stack whenever you can  As I ve see several people  including Dr Stroustrup  point out  the main reason why garbage collection has never been popular in C   is that well-written C   doesn t produce much garbage in the first place   Don t write  Object  x   new Object    or even  shared ptr lt Object gt  x new Object     when you can just write  Object x

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If you can  use boost shared ptr and standard C   auto ptr   Those convey ownership semantics   When you return an auto ptr  you are telling the caller that you are giving them ownership of the memory   When you return a shared ptr  you are telling the caller that you have a reference to it and they take part of the ownership  but it isn t solely their responsibility   These semantics also apply to parameters   If the caller passes you an auto ptr  they are giving you ownership

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C   is designed RAII in mind  There is really no better way to manage memory in C   I think  But be careful not to allocate very big chunks  like buffer objects  on local scope  It can cause stack overflows and  if there is a flaw in bounds checking while using that chunk  you can overwrite other variables or return addresses  which leads to all kinds security holes

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User smart pointers everywhere you can   Whole classes of memory leaks just go away

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valgrind  only avail for  nix platforms  is a very nice memory checker

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Great question   if you are using c   and you are developing real-time CPU-and-memory boud application  like games  you need to write your own Memory Manager   I think the better you can do is merge some interesting works of various authors  I can give you some hint    Fixed size allocator is heavily discussed  everywhere in the net Small Object Allocation was introduced by Alexandrescu in 2001 in his perfect book  Modern c   design  A great advancement  with source code distributed  can be found in an amazing article in Game Programming Gem 7  2008  named  High Performance Heap allocator  written by Dimitar Lazarov A great list of resources can be found in this article   Do not start writing a noob unuseful allocator by yourself    DOCUMENT YOURSELF first

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A frequent source of these bugs is when you have a method that accepts a reference or pointer to an object but leaves ownership unclear   Style and commenting conventions can make this less likely   Let the case where the function takes ownership of the object be the special case   In all situations where this happens  be sure to write a comment next to the function in the header file indicating this   You should strive to make sure that in most cases the module or class which allocates an object is also responsible for deallocating it   Using const can help a lot in some cases   If a function will not modify an object  and does not store a reference to it that persists after it returns  accept a const reference   From reading the caller s code it will be obvious that your function has not accepted ownership of the object   You could have had the same function accept a non-const pointer  and the caller may or may not have assumed that the callee accepted ownership  but with a const reference there s no question   Do not use non-const references in argument lists   It is very unclear when reading the caller code that the callee may have kept a reference to the parameter   I disagree with the comments recommending reference counted pointers   This usually works fine  but when you have a bug and it doesn t work  especially if your destructor does something non-trivial  such as in a multithreaded program   Definitely try to adjust your design to not need reference counting if it s not too hard

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There s already a lot about how to not leak  but if you need a tool to help you track leaks take a look at    BoundsChecker under VS  MMGR C C   lib from FluidStudio http   www paulnettle com pub FluidStudios MemoryManagers Fluid Studios Memory Manager zip  its overrides the allocation methods and creates a report of the allocations  leaks  etc

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Try to avoid allocating objects dynamically  As long as classes have appropriate constructors and destructors  use a variable of the class type  not a pointer to it  and you avoid dynamical allocation and deallocation because the compiler will do it for you  Actually that s also the mechanism used by  smart pointers  and referred to as RAII by some of the other writers  -     When you pass objects to other functions  prefer reference parameters over pointers  This avoids some possible errors  Declare parameters const  where possible  especially pointers to objects  That way objects can t be freed  accidentially   except if you cast the const away  -       Minimize the number of places in the program where you do memory allocation and deallocation  E  g  if you do allocate or free the same type several times  write a function for it  or a factory method  -    This way you can create debug output  which addresses are allocated and deallocated       easily  if required  Use a factory function to allocate objects of several related classes from a single function    If your classes have a common base class with a virtual destructor  you can free all of them using the same function  or static method   Check your program with tools like purify  unfortunately many

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Also  don t use manually allocated memory if there s a std library class  e g  vector    Make sure if you violate that rule that you have a virtual destructor

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We wrap all our allocation functions with a layer that appends a brief string at the front and a sentinel flag at the end  So for example you d have a call to  myalloc  pszSomeString  iSize  iAlignment    or new   description   iSize   MyObject    which internally allocates the specified size plus enough space for your header and sentinel  Of course  don t forget to comment this out for non-debug builds  It takes a little more memory to do this but the benefits far outweigh the costs    This has three benefits - first it allows you to easily and quickly track what code is leaking  by doing quick searches for code allocated in certain  zones  but not cleaned up when those zones should have freed  It can also be useful to detect when a boundary has been overwritten by checking to ensure all sentinels are intact  This has saved us numerous times when trying to find those well-hidden crashes or array missteps  The third benefit is in tracking the use of memory to see who the big players are - a collation of certain descriptions in a MemDump tells you when  sound  is taking up way more space than you anticipated  for example

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There s already a lot about how to not leak  but if you need a tool to help you track leaks take a look at    BoundsChecker under VS  MMGR C C   lib from FluidStudio http   www paulnettle com pub FluidStudios MemoryManagers Fluid Studios Memory Manager zip  its overrides the allocation methods and creates a report of the allocations  leaks  etc

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Read up on RAII and make sure you understand it

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A frequent source of these bugs is when you have a method that accepts a reference or pointer to an object but leaves ownership unclear   Style and commenting conventions can make this less likely   Let the case where the function takes ownership of the object be the special case   In all situations where this happens  be sure to write a comment next to the function in the header file indicating this   You should strive to make sure that in most cases the module or class which allocates an object is also responsible for deallocating it   Using const can help a lot in some cases   If a function will not modify an object  and does not store a reference to it that persists after it returns  accept a const reference   From reading the caller s code it will be obvious that your function has not accepted ownership of the object   You could have had the same function accept a non-const pointer  and the caller may or may not have assumed that the callee accepted ownership  but with a const reference there s no question   Do not use non-const references in argument lists   It is very unclear when reading the caller code that the callee may have kept a reference to the parameter   I disagree with the comments recommending reference counted pointers   This usually works fine  but when you have a bug and it doesn t work  especially if your destructor does something non-trivial  such as in a multithreaded program   Definitely try to adjust your design to not need reference counting if it s not too hard

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If you can  use boost shared ptr and standard C   auto ptr   Those convey ownership semantics   When you return an auto ptr  you are telling the caller that you are giving them ownership of the memory   When you return a shared ptr  you are telling the caller that you have a reference to it and they take part of the ownership  but it isn t solely their responsibility   These semantics also apply to parameters   If the caller passes you an auto ptr  they are giving you ownership

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User smart pointers everywhere you can   Whole classes of memory leaks just go away

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If you can t don t use a smart pointer for something  although that should be a huge red flag   type in your code with   allocate if allocation succeeded      scope       deallocate       That s obvious  but make sure you type it before you type any code in the scope

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I thoroughly endorse all the advice about RAII and smart pointers  but I d also like to add a slightly higher-level tip  the easiest memory to manage is the memory you never allocated  Unlike languages like C  and Java  where pretty much everything is a reference  in C   you should put objects on the stack whenever you can  As I ve see several people  including Dr Stroustrup  point out  the main reason why garbage collection has never been popular in C   is that well-written C   doesn t produce much garbage in the first place   Don t write  Object  x   new Object    or even  shared ptr lt Object gt  x new Object     when you can just write  Object x

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Tips in order of Importance   -Tip 1 Always remember to declare your destructors  virtual    -Tip 2 Use RAII  -Tip 3 Use boost s smartpointers  -Tip 4 Don t write your own buggy Smartpointers  use boost  on a project I m on right now I can t use boost  and I ve suffered having to debug my own smart pointers  I would definately not take the same route again  but then again right now I can t add boost to our dependencies   -Tip 5 If its some casual non-performance critical  as in games with thousands of objects  work look at Thorsten Ottosen s boost pointer container  -Tip 6 Find a leak detection header for your platform of choice such as Visual Leak Detection s  vld  header

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If you are going to manage your memory manually  you have two cases    I created the object  perhaps indirectly  by calling a function that allocates a new object   I use it  or a function I call uses it   then I free it  Somebody gave me the reference  so I should not free it    If you need to break any of these rules  please document it   It is all about pointer ownership

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valgrind is a good tool to check your programs memory leakages at runtime  too   It is available on most flavors of Linux  including Android  and on Darwin   If you use to write unit tests for your programs  you should get in the habit of systematicaly running valgrind on tests  It will potentially avoid many memory leaks at an early stage  It is also usually easier to pinpoint them in simple tests that in a full software    Of course this advice stay valid for any other memory check tool

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Instead of managing memory manually  try to use smart pointers where applicable  Take a look at the Boost lib  TR1  and smart pointers  Also smart pointers are now a part of C   standard called C  11

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Others have mentioned ways of avoiding memory leaks in the first place  like smart pointers    But a profiling and memory-analysis tool is often the only way to track down memory problems once you have them   Valgrind memcheck is an excellent free one

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Use RAII   Forget Garbage Collection  Use RAII instead   Note that even the Garbage Collector can leak  too  if you forget to  null  some references in Java C    and that Garbage Collector won t help you to dispose of resources  if you have an object which acquired a handle to a file  the file won t be freed automatically when the object will go out of scope if you don t do it manually in Java  or use the  dispose  pattern in C    Forget the  one return per function  rule  This is a good C advice to avoid leaks  but it is outdated in C   because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead   And while the  Sandwich Pattern  is a good C advice  it is outdated in C    because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead     This post seem to be repetitive  but in C    the most basic pattern to know is RAII   Learn to use smart pointers  both from boost  TR1 or even the lowly  but often efficient enough  auto ptr  but you must know its limitations    RAII is the basis of both exception safety and resource disposal in C    and no other pattern  sandwich  etc   will give you both  and most of the time  it will give you none    See below a comparison of RAII and non RAII code   void doSandwich        T   p   new T           do something with p    delete p      leak if the p processing throws or return    void doRAIIDynamic        std  auto ptr lt T gt  p new T         you can use other smart pointers  too       do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc     void doRAIIStatic        T p         do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc      About RAII  To summarize  after the comment from Ogre Psalm33   RAII relies on three concepts    Once the object is constructed  it just works  Do acquire resources in the constructor  Object destruction is enough  Do free resources in the destructor  It s all about scopes  Scoped objects  see doRAIIStatic example above  will be constructed at their declaration  and will be destroyed the moment the execution exits the scope  no matter how the exit  return  break  exception  etc      This means that in correct C   code  most objects won t be constructed with new  and will be declared on the stack instead  And for those constructed using new  all will be somehow scoped  e g  attached to a smart pointer    As a developer  this is very powerful indeed as you won t need to care about manual resource handling  as done in C  or for some objects in Java which makes intensive use of try finally for that case      Edit  2012-02-12       scoped objects     will be destructed     no matter the exit  that s not entirely true  there are ways to cheat RAII  any flavour of terminate   will bypass cleanup  exit EXIT SUCCESS  is an oxymoron in this regard           wilhelmtell   wilhelmtell is quite right about that  There are exceptional ways to cheat RAII  all leading to the process abrupt stop   Those are exceptional ways because C   code is not littered with terminate  exit  etc   or in the case with exceptions  we do want an unhandled exception to crash the process and core dump its memory image as is  and not after cleaning   But we must still know about those cases because  while they rarely happen  they can still happen    who calls terminate or exit in casual C   code     I remember having to deal with that problem when playing with GLUT  This library is very C-oriented  going as far as actively designing it to make things difficult for C   developers like not caring about stack allocated data  or having  interesting  decisions about never returning from their main loop    I won t comment about that

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One technique that has become popular with memory management in C   is RAII   Basically you use constructors destructors to handle resource allocation   Of course there are some other obnoxious details in C   due to exception safety  but the basic idea is pretty simple   The issue generally comes down to one of ownership   I highly recommend reading the Effective C   series by Scott Meyers and Modern C   Design by Andrei Alexandrescu

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Tips in order of Importance   -Tip 1 Always remember to declare your destructors  virtual    -Tip 2 Use RAII  -Tip 3 Use boost s smartpointers  -Tip 4 Don t write your own buggy Smartpointers  use boost  on a project I m on right now I can t use boost  and I ve suffered having to debug my own smart pointers  I would definately not take the same route again  but then again right now I can t add boost to our dependencies   -Tip 5 If its some casual non-performance critical  as in games with thousands of objects  work look at Thorsten Ottosen s boost pointer container  -Tip 6 Find a leak detection header for your platform of choice such as Visual Leak Detection s  vld  header

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Also  don t use manually allocated memory if there s a std library class  e g  vector    Make sure if you violate that rule that you have a virtual destructor

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There s already a lot about how to not leak  but if you need a tool to help you track leaks take a look at    BoundsChecker under VS  MMGR C C   lib from FluidStudio http   www paulnettle com pub FluidStudios MemoryManagers Fluid Studios Memory Manager zip  its overrides the allocation methods and creates a report of the allocations  leaks  etc

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If you can t don t use a smart pointer for something  although that should be a huge red flag   type in your code with   allocate if allocation succeeded      scope       deallocate       That s obvious  but make sure you type it before you type any code in the scope

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I thoroughly endorse all the advice about RAII and smart pointers  but I d also like to add a slightly higher-level tip  the easiest memory to manage is the memory you never allocated  Unlike languages like C  and Java  where pretty much everything is a reference  in C   you should put objects on the stack whenever you can  As I ve see several people  including Dr Stroustrup  point out  the main reason why garbage collection has never been popular in C   is that well-written C   doesn t produce much garbage in the first place   Don t write  Object  x   new Object    or even  shared ptr lt Object gt  x new Object     when you can just write  Object x

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You ll want to look at smart pointers  such as boost s smart pointers   Instead of   int main          Object  obj   new Object                  delete obj      boost  shared ptr will automatically delete once the reference count is zero   int main         boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object                      destructor destroys when reference count is zero     Note my last note   when reference count is zero  which is the coolest part  So If you have multiple users of your object  you won t have to keep track of whether the object is still in use  Once nobody refers to your shared pointer  it gets destroyed   This is not a panacea  however  Though you can access the base pointer  you wouldn t want to pass it to a 3rd party API unless you were confident with what it was doing  Lots of times  your  posting  stuff to some other thread for work to be done AFTER the creating scope is finished  This is common with PostThreadMessage in Win32   void foo        boost  shared ptr lt Object gt  obj new Object             Simplified here    PostThreadMessage        LPARAM ob get           Destructor destroys  pointer sent to PostThreadMessage is invalid  Zohnoes      As always  use your thinking cap with any tool

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Most memory leaks are the result of not being clear about object ownership and lifetime   The first thing to do is to allocate on the Stack whenever you can  This deals with most of the cases where you need to allocate a single object for some purpose   If you do need to  new  an object then most of the time it will have a single obvious owner for the rest of its lifetime  For this situation I tend to use a bunch of collections templates that are designed for  owning  objects stored in them by pointer  They are implemented with the STL vector and map containers but have some differences    These collections can not be copied or assigned to   once they contain objects   Pointers to objects are inserted into them  When the collection is deleted the destructor is first called on all objects in the collection   I have another version where it asserts if destructed and not empty   Since they store pointers you can also store inherited objects in these containers    My beaf with STL is that it is so focused on Value objects while in most applications objects are unique entities that do not have meaningful copy semantics required for use in those containers

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If you are going to manage your memory manually  you have two cases    I created the object  perhaps indirectly  by calling a function that allocates a new object   I use it  or a function I call uses it   then I free it  Somebody gave me the reference  so I should not free it    If you need to break any of these rules  please document it   It is all about pointer ownership

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Share and know memory ownership rules across your project  Using the COM rules makes for the best consistency   in  parameters are owned by the caller  callee must copy   out  params are owned by the caller  callee must make a copy if keeping a reference  etc

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Bah  you young kids and your new-fangled garbage collectors     Very strong rules on  ownership  - what object or part of the software has the right to delete the object    Clear comments and wise variable names to make it obvious if a pointer  owns  or is  just look  don t touch      To help decide who owns what  follow as much as possible the  sandwich  pattern within every subroutine or method   create a thing use that thing destroy that thing   Sometimes it s necessary to create and destroy in widely different places  i think hard to avoid that     In any program requiring complex data structures  i create a strict clear-cut tree of objects containing other objects - using  owner  pointers   This tree models the basic hierarchy of  application domain concepts   Example a 3D scene owns objects  lights  textures    At the end of the rendering when the program quits  there s a clear way to destroy everything      Many other pointers are defined as needed whenever one entity needs access another  to scan over arays or whatever  these are the  just looking   For the 3D scene example - an object uses a texture but does not own  other objects may use that same texture   The destruction of an object does not invoke destruction of any textures    Yes it s time consuming but that s what i do   I rarely have memory leaks or other problems   But then i work in the limited arena of high-performance scientific  data acquisition and graphics software  I don t often deal transactions like in banking and ecommerce  event-driven GUIs or high networked asynchronous chaos   Maybe the new-fangled ways have an advantage there

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Share and know memory ownership rules across your project  Using the COM rules makes for the best consistency   in  parameters are owned by the caller  callee must copy   out  params are owned by the caller  callee must make a copy if keeping a reference  etc

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For MSVC only  add the following to the top of each  cpp file    ifdef  DEBUG  define new DEBUG NEW  endif   Then  when debugging with VS2003 or greater  you will be told of any leaks when your program exits  it tracks new delete    It s basic  but it has helped me in the past

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Share and know memory ownership rules across your project  Using the COM rules makes for the best consistency   in  parameters are owned by the caller  callee must copy   out  params are owned by the caller  callee must make a copy if keeping a reference  etc

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valgrind  only avail for  nix platforms  is a very nice memory checker

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Read up on RAII and make sure you understand it

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One of the only examples about allocating and destroying in different places is thread creation  the parameter you pass   But even in this case is easy  Here is the function method creating a thread   struct myparams   int x  std  vector lt double gt  z     std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param new myparams x            Release the ownership in case thread creation is successfull if  0    pthread create  amp th  NULL  th func  param get    param release          Here instead the thread function  extern  C  void  th func void  p       try          std  auto ptr lt myparams gt  param  myparams  p                   catch                return 0      Pretty easyn isn t it  In case the thread creation fails the resource will be free d  deleted  by the auto ptr  otherwise the ownership will be passed to the thread  What if the thread is so fast that after creation it releases the resource before the  param release      gets called in the main function method  Nothing  Because we will  tell  the auto ptr to ignore the deallocation  Is C   memory management easy isn t it  Cheers   Ema

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Also  don t use manually allocated memory if there s a std library class  e g  vector    Make sure if you violate that rule that you have a virtual destructor

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Great question   if you are using c   and you are developing real-time CPU-and-memory boud application  like games  you need to write your own Memory Manager   I think the better you can do is merge some interesting works of various authors  I can give you some hint    Fixed size allocator is heavily discussed  everywhere in the net Small Object Allocation was introduced by Alexandrescu in 2001 in his perfect book  Modern c   design  A great advancement  with source code distributed  can be found in an amazing article in Game Programming Gem 7  2008  named  High Performance Heap allocator  written by Dimitar Lazarov A great list of resources can be found in this article   Do not start writing a noob unuseful allocator by yourself    DOCUMENT YOURSELF first

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Bah  you young kids and your new-fangled garbage collectors     Very strong rules on  ownership  - what object or part of the software has the right to delete the object    Clear comments and wise variable names to make it obvious if a pointer  owns  or is  just look  don t touch      To help decide who owns what  follow as much as possible the  sandwich  pattern within every subroutine or method   create a thing use that thing destroy that thing   Sometimes it s necessary to create and destroy in widely different places  i think hard to avoid that     In any program requiring complex data structures  i create a strict clear-cut tree of objects containing other objects - using  owner  pointers   This tree models the basic hierarchy of  application domain concepts   Example a 3D scene owns objects  lights  textures    At the end of the rendering when the program quits  there s a clear way to destroy everything      Many other pointers are defined as needed whenever one entity needs access another  to scan over arays or whatever  these are the  just looking   For the 3D scene example - an object uses a texture but does not own  other objects may use that same texture   The destruction of an object does not invoke destruction of any textures    Yes it s time consuming but that s what i do   I rarely have memory leaks or other problems   But then i work in the limited arena of high-performance scientific  data acquisition and graphics software  I don t often deal transactions like in banking and ecommerce  event-driven GUIs or high networked asynchronous chaos   Maybe the new-fangled ways have an advantage there

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valgrind is a good tool to check your programs memory leakages at runtime  too   It is available on most flavors of Linux  including Android  and on Darwin   If you use to write unit tests for your programs  you should get in the habit of systematicaly running valgrind on tests  It will potentially avoid many memory leaks at an early stage  It is also usually easier to pinpoint them in simple tests that in a full software    Of course this advice stay valid for any other memory check tool

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User smart pointers everywhere you can   Whole classes of memory leaks just go away

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If you can t don t use a smart pointer for something  although that should be a huge red flag   type in your code with   allocate if allocation succeeded      scope       deallocate       That s obvious  but make sure you type it before you type any code in the scope

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Read up on RAII and make sure you understand it

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Instead of managing memory manually  try to use smart pointers where applicable  Take a look at the Boost lib  TR1  and smart pointers  Also smart pointers are now a part of C   standard called C  11

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Use RAII   Forget Garbage Collection  Use RAII instead   Note that even the Garbage Collector can leak  too  if you forget to  null  some references in Java C    and that Garbage Collector won t help you to dispose of resources  if you have an object which acquired a handle to a file  the file won t be freed automatically when the object will go out of scope if you don t do it manually in Java  or use the  dispose  pattern in C    Forget the  one return per function  rule  This is a good C advice to avoid leaks  but it is outdated in C   because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead   And while the  Sandwich Pattern  is a good C advice  it is outdated in C    because of its use of exceptions  use RAII instead     This post seem to be repetitive  but in C    the most basic pattern to know is RAII   Learn to use smart pointers  both from boost  TR1 or even the lowly  but often efficient enough  auto ptr  but you must know its limitations    RAII is the basis of both exception safety and resource disposal in C    and no other pattern  sandwich  etc   will give you both  and most of the time  it will give you none    See below a comparison of RAII and non RAII code   void doSandwich        T   p   new T           do something with p    delete p      leak if the p processing throws or return    void doRAIIDynamic        std  auto ptr lt T gt  p new T         you can use other smart pointers  too       do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc     void doRAIIStatic        T p         do something with p       WON T EVER LEAK  even in case of exceptions  returns  breaks  etc      About RAII  To summarize  after the comment from Ogre Psalm33   RAII relies on three concepts    Once the object is constructed  it just works  Do acquire resources in the constructor  Object destruction is enough  Do free resources in the destructor  It s all about scopes  Scoped objects  see doRAIIStatic example above  will be constructed at their declaration  and will be destroyed the moment the execution exits the scope  no matter how the exit  return  break  exception  etc      This means that in correct C   code  most objects won t be constructed with new  and will be declared on the stack instead  And for those constructed using new  all will be somehow scoped  e g  attached to a smart pointer    As a developer  this is very powerful indeed as you won t need to care about manual resource handling  as done in C  or for some objects in Java which makes intensive use of try finally for that case      Edit  2012-02-12       scoped objects     will be destructed     no matter the exit  that s not entirely true  there are ways to cheat RAII  any flavour of terminate   will bypass cleanup  exit EXIT SUCCESS  is an oxymoron in this regard           wilhelmtell   wilhelmtell is quite right about that  There are exceptional ways to cheat RAII  all leading to the process abrupt stop   Those are exceptional ways because C   code is not littered with terminate  exit  etc   or in the case with exceptions  we do want an unhandled exception to crash the process and core dump its memory image as is  and not after cleaning   But we must still know about those cases because  while they rarely happen  they can still happen    who calls terminate or exit in casual C   code     I remember having to deal with that problem when playing with GLUT  This library is very C-oriented  going as far as actively designing it to make things difficult for C   developers like not caring about stack allocated data  or having  interesting  decisions about never returning from their main loop    I won t comment about that

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Try to avoid allocating objects dynamically  As long as classes have appropriate constructors and destructors  use a variable of the class type  not a pointer to it  and you avoid dynamical allocation and deallocation because the compiler will do it for you  Actually that s also the mechanism used by  smart pointers  and referred to as RAII by some of the other writers  -     When you pass objects to other functions  prefer reference parameters over pointers  This avoids some possible errors  Declare parameters const  where possible  especially pointers to objects  That way objects can t be freed  accidentially   except if you cast the const away  -       Minimize the number of places in the program where you do memory allocation and deallocation  E  g  if you do allocate or free the same type several times  write a function for it  or a factory method  -    This way you can create debug output  which addresses are allocated and deallocated       easily  if required  Use a factory function to allocate objects of several related classes from a single function    If your classes have a common base class with a virtual destructor  you can free all of them using the same function  or static method   Check your program with tools like purify  unfortunately many

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Read up on RAII and make sure you understand it

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For MSVC only  add the following to the top of each  cpp file    ifdef  DEBUG  define new DEBUG NEW  endif   Then  when debugging with VS2003 or greater  you will be told of any leaks when your program exits  it tracks new delete    It s basic  but it has helped me in the past

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Bah  you young kids and your new-fangled garbage collectors     Very strong rules on  ownership  - what object or part of the software has the right to delete the object    Clear comments and wise variable names to make it obvious if a pointer  owns  or is  just look  don t touch      To help decide who owns what  follow as much as possible the  sandwich  pattern within every subroutine or method   create a thing use that thing destroy that thing   Sometimes it s necessary to create and destroy in widely different places  i think hard to avoid that     In any program requiring complex data structures  i create a strict clear-cut tree of objects containing other objects - using  owner  pointers   This tree models the basic hierarchy of  application domain concepts   Example a 3D scene owns objects  lights  textures    At the end of the rendering when the program quits  there s a clear way to destroy everything      Many other pointers are defined as needed whenever one entity needs access another  to scan over arays or whatever  these are the  just looking   For the 3D scene example - an object uses a texture but does not own  other objects may use that same texture   The destruction of an object does not invoke destruction of any textures    Yes it s time consuming but that s what i do   I rarely have memory leaks or other problems   But then i work in the limited arena of high-performance scientific  data acquisition and graphics software  I don t often deal transactions like in banking and ecommerce  event-driven GUIs or high networked asynchronous chaos   Maybe the new-fangled ways have an advantage there

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For MSVC only  add the following to the top of each  cpp file    ifdef  DEBUG  define new DEBUG NEW  endif   Then  when debugging with VS2003 or greater  you will be told of any leaks when your program exits  it tracks new delete    It s basic  but it has helped me in the past

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Manage memory the same way you manage other resources  handles  files  db connections  sockets      GC would not help you with them either

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Try to avoid allocating objects dynamically  As long as classes have appropriate constructors and destructors  use a variable of the class type  not a pointer to it  and you avoid dynamical allocation and deallocation because the compiler will do it for you  Actually that s also the mechanism used by  smart pointers  and referred to as RAII by some of the other writers  -     When you pass objects to other functions  prefer reference parameters over pointers  This avoids some possible errors  Declare parameters const  where possible  especially pointers to objects  That way objects can t be freed  accidentially   except if you cast the const away  -       Minimize the number of places in the program where you do memory allocation and deallocation  E  g  if you do allocate or free the same type several times  write a function for it  or a factory method  -    This way you can create debug output  which addresses are allocated and deallocated       easily  if required  Use a factory function to allocate objects of several related classes from a single function    If your classes have a common base class with a virtual destructor  you can free all of them using the same function  or static method   Check your program with tools like purify  unfortunately many

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Exactly one return from any function  That way you can do deallocation there and never miss it   It s too easy to make a mistake otherwise   new a   if  Bad     delete a  return   new b   if  Bad     delete a  delete b  return          etc

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Bah  you young kids and your new-fangled garbage collectors     Very strong rules on  ownership  - what object or part of the software has the right to delete the object    Clear comments and wise variable names to make it obvious if a pointer  owns  or is  just look  don t touch      To help decide who owns what  follow as much as possible the  sandwich  pattern within every subroutine or method   create a thing use that thing destroy that thing   Sometimes it s necessary to create and destroy in widely different places  i think hard to avoid that     In any program requiring complex data structures  i create a strict clear-cut tree of objects containing other objects - using  owner  pointers   This tree models the basic hierarchy of  application domain concepts   Example a 3D scene owns objects  lights  textures    At the end of the rendering when the program quits  there s a clear way to destroy everything      Many other pointers are defined as needed whenever one entity needs access another  to scan over arays or whatever  these are the  just looking   For the 3D scene example - an object uses a texture but does not own  other objects may use that same texture   The destruction of an object does not invoke destruction of any textures    Yes it s time consuming but that s what i do   I rarely have memory leaks or other problems   But then i work in the limited arena of high-performance scientific  data acquisition and graphics software  I don t often deal transactions like in banking and ecommerce  event-driven GUIs or high networked asynchronous chaos   Maybe the new-fangled ways have an advantage there

[c++] General guidelines to avoid memory leaks in C++

Examples related to c++

Examples related to memory

Examples related to memory-management

Examples related to raii