Working with Visual Studios C++ manifest files

Question

I have written some code that makes use of an open source library to do some of the heavy lifting. This work was done in linux, with unit tests and cmake to help with porting it

Answer 1

If a third party DLL allocates memory that you need to free, then the DLL has broken one of the major rules of shipping precompiled DLL's. Exactly for this reason.

If a DLL ships in binary form only, then it should also ship all of the redistributable components that it is linked against and its entry points should isolate the caller from any potential runtime library version issues, such as different allocators. If they follow those rules then you shouldn't suffer. If they don't then you are either going to have pain and suffering or you need to complain to the third party authors.