Destruction of allocated memory

[Laurens]

Hi,

 

This is probably a real simple question but I was unable to find a conclusive answer searching the web for a bit.

 

I have a singleton that manages some pointers to objects that have been new'ed at some point.

 

Now, if my game has a clean exit, will the O/S (Windows/Linux/Mac) automatically reclaim the memory that my game was using without me having actually deleted the singleton and the pointers it manages?

 

And what if my game crashes? Will the O/S still reclaim the memory?

 

Thanks!

[Canardia]

Yeah, the OS will clean up the memory, even if the game crashes, but it's not a good way to do things. Write your code so that it doesn't crash and delete the memory yourself.

[Laurens]

Good to know, thanks!

[Mumbles]

It's still always a good idea to free old mallocs (and delete old news) that you no longer need... You just never know how much RAM another system will have available.

[Canardia]

The biggest problem when not freeing your classes with delete, is that their destructors will never get called. So if you do some file I/O in the destructor (like deleting temp files), they will never get deleted, so it's not always only a issue about freeing the memory.

 

Why do you think you have thousand of temp files in your temp folder?

They are mostly remains from crashed programs, or not responding programs which you had to terminate from the process list in task manager.

[Laurens]

The object in question does not open any files or anything so that would have not been a problem, but to ensure some future requirement won't change this I opted to no longer use singletons but instead use the service locator pattern that does give me control over when I want to delete the managers.

 

Cheers!