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

Think of it this way. When developing in a language that requires the coder to manage memory, you need to explicitly allocate and destroy the memory for every single object your program will use. It's very easy to know when you don't create something properly, as your program will not work. It is much tougher to find and debug the cases where you don't destroy the object properly (this is known as a memory leak).

Lets take a typical application, lets say an RSS news reader. In an application like this, there are often many loops (looping through different RSS feeds, different RSS items, RSS Tags, and so on). If you have an instance where a created object is not properly destroyed (or released), every time that 'leaking' code is run, you will wind up with another abandoned object in memory. If the loop runs 1,000 times, you will have 1,000 abandoned objects taking up space. You can see how this can quickly add up to consume valuable resources.