Pointers in C Programming: A Modern Approach to Memory Management, Recursive Data Structures, Strings, and Arrays

© Thomas Mailund 2021

T. MailundPointers in C Programminghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6927-5_15

15. Reference Counting Garbage Collection

Thomas Mailund¹  

(1)

Aarhus N, Denmark

 

Keeping track of when memory should be freed, so we always remember to do it and never call free() on the same memory twice, is at times complicated. The scenario where you have a function that allocates some memory, uses it, and then frees it before the function returns is hardly ever problematic. If you have many exit points, that is, you return multiple places, you must ensure that you free everything regardless of how you exit the function, but unless it is an incredibly complicated function, it is manageable. However, once you start working with heap-allocated data ...