In C, and C++, assuming that I’m not using smart pointers or any other weird garbage collecting mechanism, does memory get deallocated (garbage collected) when the program exits?
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In C, and C++, assuming that I’m not using smart pointers or any other weird garbage collecting mechanism, does memory get deallocated (garbage collected) when the program exits?
Yes, any memory you don’t free will be automatically freed by the operating system when your program exits. This means it’s generally safe to call
exit()at any time, though you need to be careful about other resources that aren’t automatically freed, like global atoms on Windows and named pipes and others.