Discussion on: I'm an Expert in Memory Management & Segfaults, Ask Me Anything!

[George]

What are some of the common issues you find when working in memory management? Do you have one way of working through them or multiple?

[Jason C. McDonald]

I do go through a little list in my mind:

• Do my allocations and frees match? (malloc and its cousins with free, new with delete, new[] with delete[]).
• Do I null out my pointers immediately after freeing?
• Do I check if a pointer is null before using it?
• Does my pointer math have any edge cases?
• Are my iteration loops all safe? (I always get uneasy around while loops that touch allocated memory.)
• Do my recursive functions have explicit stop conditions?
• Are my C-strings (if any) null terminated?
• Are my destructors properly freeing allocated memory?
• Do I have tests for all major functionalities?
• Are all my tests running Valgrind-pure?