Question

Many libraries like SDL, etc, etc have in their tutorials method calls that free resources right before quitting the program, but as far as I know, most OSes free all memory from the processes when they quit, why do I need to bother to free them if the application is going to quit anyway?

Answer 1

Even if your OS (not all do that) frees memory at exit, there are some reasons:

• it’s good manner
• it adds symmetry, so code looks better
• OS does not automatically free some resources at exit, like devices (sensors, scanners…)
• if someone takes this code and places it in a program that uses the libraries only in a small part of his runtime, the resources will be free when not needed.
• if you are looking for bad memory leaks, your debugger won’t find these unimportant ones.