.NET Programming: A Practical Guide Using C#

Automatic Memory Management

Every program stores instances of datatypes in memory. This per-instance memory can be allocated either in the data segment, the stack, or the heap. Typically, static variables in a program are stored in the data segment and local variables to a method are stored on the stack. The compiler inserts appropriate logic in the output code to deal with memory management of data-segment-bound and stack-based types. For heap-based types, a programmer has to explicitly deal with memory management issues. Here are the typical steps a programmer goes through to deal with heap-based types:

1.	Allocate memory of proper size for the instance of the type. Under C++ and C#, for example, this can be done using the operator new.
2. ...