I have a background in Java and I'm still not fully used to the concept of pointers and scope, so sorry if the question seems silly.
I read somewhere that I should delete pointers that I have allocated on the Heap. I understand that but should I also delete a pointer that is given to me like this:
#include<dirent.h>
DIR* dir;
struct dirent* entries;
dir= opendir("D:/DIR")
entries= readdir(entries)
// Should I delete the pointers after I'm done with them?
delete entries;
delete dir;
Should I delete the pointers which are assigned from somewhere else or just going out of scope deletes them automatically?
Or is it even right to delete them since I haven't assigned them using new
? But then if it's wrong how can I make sure that the memory assigned from the other methods would be deleted after I'm finished using them?
C is not the same as C++, notably for this aspect.
When using some external C (or C++) function provided by some external library, you should read its documentation and follow the "ownership" rules and conventions. For example if you use getline
you understand that you need to free
like here. If you use opendir
you should use closedir
. If you use sqlite3_prepare_v2
you'll need to sqlite3_finalize
it, etc... Sometimes you'll think in terms of some abstract data type (like here) with a destructor-like function.
When you develop your own (public or "private") function in C, you need to document if it returns heap allocated memory and who (and how) is responsible of free
(or releasing) it.
With C++, you also have smart pointers and RAII; so you generally can avoid manual new
and delete
. Smart pointers are helpful, but not a silver bullet.
So you should explicit and document conventions (and follow the conventions of external libraries and APIs) about ownership. Understanding and defining wisely such conventions is an important task.
Circular references are difficult to handle (consider weak pointers when applicable). I recommend reading about garbage collection concepts and techniques (e.g. the GC handbook), to at least be able to name appropriately your approaches and understand the limitations and power of reference counting. In some cases, you might even explicitly use a garbage collector library or code your own allocator.
Manual memory management is a whole program property, and that is why it is hard. There are even cases (long-living processes doing a lot of allocation) where you need to be afraid of fragmentation.
Tools like valgrind and the address sanitizer (with GCC's instrumentation options or Clang's ones) are practically very helpful to hunt memory leaks and some other memory bugs. Be also aware of ASLR. Take care to understand the virtual address space of your process. On Linux, read proc(5) then try cat /proc/$$/maps
and cat /proc/self/maps
in some terminal for a useful insight.