Learning Boost C++ Libraries

Chapter 3. Memory Management and Exception Safety

C++ has a great deal of compatibility with the C programming language. C++ retains pointers for representing and accessing specific memory addresses and provides manual memory management primitives via the new and delete operators. You can also seamlessly access from C++, the C Standard Library functions and C system calls or platform APIs of most major operating systems. Naturally, C++ code often deals with handles to various OS resources, like heap memory, open files, sockets, threads, and shared memory. Acquiring such resources and failing to release them could have undesirable consequences for your programs, showing up as insidious bugs, including memory leaks and deadlocks.

In this chapter, ...