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.
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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.
In computer science, a finalizer or finalize method is a special method that performs finalization, generally some form of cleanup. A finalizer is executed during object destruction, prior to the object being deallocated, and is complementary to an initializer, which is executed during object creation, following allocation. Finalizers are strongly discouraged by some, due to difficulty in proper use and the complexity they add, and alternatives are suggested instead, mainly the dispose pattern (see problems with finalizers).
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.
Various forms of real-world data, such as social, financial, and biological networks, can berepresented using graphs. An efficient method of analysing this type of data is to extractsubgraph patterns, such as cliques, cycles, and motifs, from graphs. For i ...
Comprehensive memory safety validation identifies the memory objects whose accesses provably comply with all classes of memory safety, protecting them from memory errors elsewhere at low overhead. We assess the breadth and depth of comprehensive memory saf ...
Memory-unsafe languages are widely used to implement critical systems like kernels and browsers, leading to thousands of memory safety issues every year. A use-after-free bug is a temporal memory error where the program accidentally visits a freed memory l ...