Professional C++, 6th Edition

7Memory Management

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Different ways to use and manage memory
• The often-perplexing relationship between arrays and pointers
• A low-level look at working with memory
• Common memory pitfalls
• Smart pointers and how to use them

WILEY.COM DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

Please note that all the code examples for this chapter are available as part of this chapter's code download on the book's website at www.wiley.com/go/proc++6e on the Download Code tab.

When you use modern constructs, such as std::vector, std::string, and so on, as is done starting from Chapter 1, “A Crash Course in C++ and the Standard Library,” and throughout all the other chapters of this book, then C++ is a safe language. The language provides many roads, lines, and traffic lights, such as the C++ Core Guidelines (see Appendix B, “Annotated Bibliography”), static code analyzers to analyze the correctness of code, and many more.

However, C++ does allow you to drive off-road. One example of driving off-road is manual memory management (allocation and deallocation). Such manual memory management is a particularly error-prone area of C++ programming. To write high-quality C++ programs, professional C++ programmers need to understand how memory works behind the scenes. This first chapter of Part III explores the ins and outs of memory management. You will learn about the pitfalls of dynamic memory and some techniques for avoiding and eliminating them.

This chapter discusses low-level ...