What is a memory leak?

Question

Obviously Wikipedia has a fair amount of information on the topic, but I wanted to make sure I understand. And from what I can tell it\'s important to understand the stack/h

Answer 1

Your function variables are also on the stack usually, not the heap. In most systems, the heap is used for dynamic allocations. The usual memory leak situation is

1. Call some function F
2. F allocates (new or malloc) some memory
3. F returns to caller (no delete/free)
4. pointer pointing to the dynamically allocated memory is out of scope
   • the memory is still allocated.
   • You can't delete/free it anymore