.NET and COM Interoperability Handbook, The

Garbage Collection

Dynamically allocated memory is the bane of most programmers' existence. Although you need heap memory to write most non-trivial applications, managing this memory correctly is an error-prone nightmare. Only the most careful and diligent programmers get it right, and failure to do so results in applications that leak memory (because the programmer forgot to free memory that is no longer being used) or that crash sporadically because the programmers have deallocated memory that is still needed by their application. These two bugs are the two biggest time-wasters in software development for programmers and for testers who spend countless hours finding and documenting these bugs. They also take a huge toll on the productivity ...