Manual Memory Management

You allocate and deallocate heap memory yourself.

If not done with care, this can lead to crashes, bugs, security vulnerabilities, and memory leaks.

C Example

You must call free on every pointer you allocate with malloc:

void foo(size_t n) {
    int* int_array = (int*)malloc(n * sizeof(int));
    //
    // ... lots of code
    //
    free(int_array);
}

Memory is leaked if the function returns early between malloc and free: the pointer is lost and we cannot deallocate the memory.