Why does Bounds CheckerTM say that I have memory leaks?
This is not an STL bug. It is an artifact of certain kinds of leak detectors. In the default STL allocator, memory allocated for blocks of small objects is not returned to malloc. It can only be reused by subsequent allocate requests of (approximately) the same size. Thus programs that use the default may appear to leak memory when monitored by certain kinds of simple leak detectors. This is intentional. Such “leaks” do not accumulate over time. Such “leaks” are not reported by garbage-collector-like leak detectors. The primary design criterion for the default STL allocator was to make it no slower than the HP STL per-class allocators, but potentially thread-safe, and significantly less prone to fragmentation. Like the HP allocators, it does not maintain the necessary data structures to free entire chunks of small objects when none of the contained small objects are in use. This is an intentional choice of execution time over space use. It may not be appropriate for all programs. On ma
