Memory Leaks and Dangling Pointers

A memory leak occurs when all pointers to a block of allocated memory have been lost.
- Leaked memory cannot be accessed or reallocated.
- Excessive memory leaks may cause the program to crash.
A dangling pointer is a non-null pointer that points to unallocated memory.
- Dereferencing a dangling pointer may cause the program to crash.
- Always set dangling pointers to NULL.
Example - The Vector class - vector.h (original), vector.h(copy) , vector.cpp .

This page was last modified on Oct 25, 2000

URL: http://people.hsc.edu/faculty-staff/robbk/Coms262/Lectures/LeaksAndDangles.html