Memory Management

Kade Miller

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What Is Memory Management?

Memory management is how your program uses RAM, allocating space when needed and cleaning it up when you're done. In C++, you do this manually so you’ve gotta stay on top of it.

If you don’t? You get:

• Memory leaks (you forgot to free memory)
• Dangling pointers (you freed memory but still point to it)
• Crashes (accessing memory you don’t own)

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Static vs Dynamic Memory:

Type	Allocated At	Frees Automatically?	Example
Stack	Compile-time	Yes	int x = 5;
Heap	Runtime	No (you handle it)	int* x = new int;

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Using new and delete

int* ptr = new int;   // allocates space on heap
*ptr = 10;
delete ptr;           // frees the memory