One post tagged with "pwn"

How it all started​

While debugging a memory leak bug during my summer internship, I found out that one of our APIs returned a raw pointer and thus transferred its ownership to the caller (me). In other words, I'm now responsible of delete-ing the pointer after my code finishes. While this is a terrible engineering practice, I grew interested in how memory leaks happen, and how delete[] solves the problem.

After some research & experiments, I wrote this blog post, which hopefully addresses three sets of questions

1. What are memory leaks?
2. How are objects allocated on the heap? How does delete[] know which area of memory to be freed?
3. How can we prevent memory leaks from happening?