C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

60. Avoid allocating and deallocating memory in different modules

Summary

Put things back where you found them: Allocating memory in one module and deallocating it in a different module makes your program fragile by creating a subtle long-distance dependency between those modules. They must be compiled with the same compiler version and same flags (notably debug vs. NDEBUG) and the same standard library implementation, and in practice the module allocating the memory had better still be loaded when the deallocation happens.

Discussion

Library writers want to improve the quality of their libraries, and as a direct consequence the internal data structures and algorithms used by the standard memory allocator can significantly vary from one version ...