Topic summary
Memory leaks
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Memory leak.
Programming issues
Memory leaks are a common error in programming, especially when using languages that have no built in automatic garbage collection, such as C and C++. Typically, a memory leak occurs because dynamically allocated memory has become unreachable. The prevalence of memory leak bugs has led to the development of a number of debuggingtools to detect unreachable memory. BoundsChecker, Deleaker, Memory Validator, IBM Rational Purify, Valgrind, ParasoftInsure++, Dr. Memory and memwatch are some of the more popular memory debuggers for C and C++ programs. "Conservative" garbage collection capabilities can be added to any programming language that lacks it as a built-in feature, and libraries for doing this are available for C and C++ programs. A conservative collector finds and reclaims most, but not all, unreachable memory.