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Manual memory management
In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp. Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as Java are increasingly popular and the languages Objective-C and Swift provide similar functionality through Automatic Reference Counting. The main manually managed languages still in widespread use today are C and C++ – see C dynamic memory allocation.
Many programming languages use manual techniques to determine when to allocate a new object from the free store. C uses the malloc function; C++ and Java use the new operator; and many other languages (such as Python) allocate all objects from the free store. Determining when an object ought to be created (object creation) is generally trivial and unproblematic, though techniques such as object pools mean an object may be created before immediate use. The real challenge is object destruction – determination of when an object is no longer needed (i.e. is garbage), and arranging for its underlying storage to be returned to the free store for re-use. In manual memory allocation, this is also specified manually by the programmer; via functions such as free() in C, or the delete operator in C++ – this contrasts with automatic destruction of objects held in automatic variables, notably (non-static) local variables of functions, which are destroyed at the end of their scope in C and C++.
For example:
Manual memory management is known to enable several major classes of bugs into a program when used incorrectly, notably violations of memory safety or memory leaks. These are a significant source of security bugs.
Languages which exclusively use garbage collection are known to avoid the last two classes of defects. Memory leaks can still occur (and bounded leaks frequently occur with generational or conservative garbage collection), but are generally less severe than memory leaks in manual systems.
Manual memory management has one correctness advantage, which is that it allows automatic resource management via the resource acquisition is initialization (RAII) paradigm.
This arises when objects own scarce system resources (like graphics resources, file handles, or database connections) which must be relinquished when an object is destroyed – when the lifetime of the resource ownership should be tied to the lifetime of the object. Languages with manual management can arrange this by acquiring the resource during object initialization (in the constructor), and releasing during object destruction (in the destructor), which occurs at a precise time. This is known as Resource Acquisition Is Initialization.
This can also be used with deterministic reference counting. In C++, this ability is put to further use to automate memory deallocation within an otherwise-manual framework, use of the shared_ptr template in the language's standard library to perform memory management is a common paradigm. shared_ptr is not suitable for all object usage patterns, however.
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Manual memory management
In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supported manual memory management, though garbage collection has existed since 1959, when it was introduced with Lisp. Today, however, languages with garbage collection such as Java are increasingly popular and the languages Objective-C and Swift provide similar functionality through Automatic Reference Counting. The main manually managed languages still in widespread use today are C and C++ – see C dynamic memory allocation.
Many programming languages use manual techniques to determine when to allocate a new object from the free store. C uses the malloc function; C++ and Java use the new operator; and many other languages (such as Python) allocate all objects from the free store. Determining when an object ought to be created (object creation) is generally trivial and unproblematic, though techniques such as object pools mean an object may be created before immediate use. The real challenge is object destruction – determination of when an object is no longer needed (i.e. is garbage), and arranging for its underlying storage to be returned to the free store for re-use. In manual memory allocation, this is also specified manually by the programmer; via functions such as free() in C, or the delete operator in C++ – this contrasts with automatic destruction of objects held in automatic variables, notably (non-static) local variables of functions, which are destroyed at the end of their scope in C and C++.
For example:
Manual memory management is known to enable several major classes of bugs into a program when used incorrectly, notably violations of memory safety or memory leaks. These are a significant source of security bugs.
Languages which exclusively use garbage collection are known to avoid the last two classes of defects. Memory leaks can still occur (and bounded leaks frequently occur with generational or conservative garbage collection), but are generally less severe than memory leaks in manual systems.
Manual memory management has one correctness advantage, which is that it allows automatic resource management via the resource acquisition is initialization (RAII) paradigm.
This arises when objects own scarce system resources (like graphics resources, file handles, or database connections) which must be relinquished when an object is destroyed – when the lifetime of the resource ownership should be tied to the lifetime of the object. Languages with manual management can arrange this by acquiring the resource during object initialization (in the constructor), and releasing during object destruction (in the destructor), which occurs at a precise time. This is known as Resource Acquisition Is Initialization.
This can also be used with deterministic reference counting. In C++, this ability is put to further use to automate memory deallocation within an otherwise-manual framework, use of the shared_ptr template in the language's standard library to perform memory management is a common paradigm. shared_ptr is not suitable for all object usage patterns, however.