What is a memory leak and why should I care?
A memory leak is when your program loses track of a piece of memory that was allocated. The consequence is that the “leaked” memory will never be freed by the program. This usually happens when a piece of code does a “new,” “malloc,” or “alloc” but never does a corresponding “delete”, “free” or “release” respectively. When you new, malloc, or alloc, what the Operating System is doing is giving your program a chunk of memory on the heap. The OS is saying, “here, have this block of memory at this memory address.” It expects you to hold a reference to that memory address (usually in the form of a pointer) and it’s relying on you to tell the OS when you’re done with it (by calling free, delete, or release). Memory leaks happen when you throw away your pointer to that memory. If your program no longer knows where on the heap your memory is allocated, how can you ever free it? So why should you care? In the most minor case, you’re wasting memory that will be freed when the user quits your ap
