1. Dynamic Memory Management
CSCE 121

2. Memory Leaks Lose access to memory allocated on the heap.
Easy to lose when dealing with pointers
We want to avoid!!!
Sometimes conflated with poor memory management.

3. Managing Memory Programmer gets memory from the heap
Programmer must free it when done
Commonly referred to as garbage collection.
Good exam question
What are specific scenarios that can result in a memory leak?
Think about the definition of a memory leak as we continue to discuss dynamic memory management.

4. Strategies to Manage Dynamic Memory (i.e. do garbage collection)
Impractical
Avoid using dynamic memory.
Balance allocation with deallocation.
news with deletes
Automatic Garbage Collection
While these do exist for C++, tend to be inefficient and slow things down.
RAII – Resource Allocation is Initialization
When possible
allocate in the constructor
deallocate in the destructor
Too broad as
a strategy.
Inefficient, use a different language.
Preferred!

5. Dynamic Classes
Classes that use dynamic memory, must implement certain functions to effectively manage memory on the heap.
Rule of Three If you implement one of the following, you must implement the other two!
Destructor
Copy Assignment
Copy Constructor
Rule of Five (We won’t cover these)
Move Assignment
Move Constructor
We’ll see more on these later.
Things will break if you do not implement these!
Things will work, but not efficiently!