Manual memory management

In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp. Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as Java are increasingly popular and the languages Objective-C and Swift provide similar functionality through Automatic Reference Counting. The main manually managed languages still in widespread use today are C and C++ – see C dynamic memory allocation. Many programming languages use manual techniques to determine when to allocate a new object from the free store. C uses the malloc function; C++ and Java use the new operator; and many other languages (such as Python) allocate all objects from the free store. Determining when an object ought to be created (object creation) is generally trivial and unproblematic, though techniques such as object pools mean an object may be created before immediate use. The real challenge is object destruction – determination of when an object is no longer needed (i.e. is garbage), and arranging for its underlying storage to be returned to the free store for re-use. In manual memory allocation, this is also specified manually by the programmer; via functions such as free() in C, or the delete operator in C++ – this contrasts with automatic destruction of objects held in automatic variables, notably (non-static) local variables of functions, which are destroyed at the end of their scope in C and C++. For example malloc/free Memory arena scratch buffer Memory safety Manual memory management is known to enable several major classes of bugs into a program when used incorrectly, notably violations of memory safety or memory leaks. These are a significant source of security bugs. When an unused object is never released back to the free store, this is known as a memory leak.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (23)

Related courses (8)

Related lectures (96)

ENG-270: Computational methods and tools

This course prepares students to use modern computational methods and tools for solving problems in engineering and science.

CS-460: Systems for data management and data science

This course is intended for students who want to understand modern large-scale data analysis systems and database systems. The course covers fundamental principles for understanding and building syste

MATH-611: Scientific programming for Engineers

The students will acquire a solid knowledge on the processes necessary to design, write and use scientific software. Software design techniques will be used to program a multi-usage particles code, ai

Resource management (computing)

In computer programming, resource management refers to techniques for managing resources (components with limited availability). Computer programs may manage their own resources by using features exposed by programming languages ( is a survey article contrasting different approaches), or may elect to manage them by a host – an operating system or virtual machine – or another program. Host-based management is known as resource tracking, and consists of cleaning up resource leaks: terminating access to resources that have been acquired but not released after use.

Manual memory management

Memory safety

Memory safety is the state of being protected from various software bugs and security vulnerabilities when dealing with memory access, such as buffer overflows and dangling pointers. For example, Java is said to be memory-safe because its runtime error detection checks array bounds and pointer dereferences. In contrast, C and C++ allow arbitrary pointer arithmetic with pointers implemented as direct memory addresses with no provision for bounds checking, and thus are potentially memory-unsafe.

Memory Management in Computer Systems ME-213: Programmation pour ingénieur

Covers the fundamentals of memory management in computer systems.

Memory Management: Crash Reasons and Solutions ME-213: Programmation pour ingénieur

Delves into the reasons behind program crashes related to memory management.

Garbage Collection in Object-Oriented Languages CS-420: Advanced compiler construction

Explores garbage collection techniques in object-oriented languages, focusing on mostly-copying and generational GC, heap organization, promotion policies, and method dispatch challenges.