CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++visual-studio
user516935
user516935

Reputation: 45

About Memory Management When mentioning C++

When someone mention the memory management the c++ is capable of doing, how can i see this thing? is this done in theory like guessing?
i took a logical design intro course and it covered the systems of numbers and boolean algebra and combinational logic,will this help?
so say in Visual Studio , is there some kind of a tool to visualize the memory,i hope im not being ridiculous here ?

thank you.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 302

Answers (3)

Chubsdad
Chubsdad

Reputation: 25557

In Visual Studio, there is a Memory Window (Alt+6) that will let you read/write memory manually provided it is a valid memory location for the operation you are trying to do, during debugging.

On Windows platform, you can get a first initial feel of memory management using tools like perfmon.exe, taskmgr.exe and many other tools from sysinternals

Upvotes: 0

Tony Delroy
Tony Delroy

Reputation: 106254

C++ has a variety of memory areas:

  • space used for global and static variables, which is pre-allocated by the compiler
  • "stack" memory that's used for preserving caller context during function calls, passing some function arguments (others may fit in CPU registers), and local variables
  • "heap" memory that's allocated using new or new[](C++'s preferred approach) or malloc (a lower-level function inherited from C), and released with delete, delete[] or free respectively.

The heap is important in that it supports run-time requests for arbitrary amounts of memory, and the usage persists until delete or free is explicitly used, rather than being tied to the lifetime of particular function calls as per stack memory.

I'm not aware of any useful tools for visualising and categorising the overall memory usage of a running C++ program, less still for relating that back to which pointers in the source code currently have how much memory associated with them. As a very general guideline, it's encouraged to write code in such a way that pointers are only introduced when the program is ready to point them at something, and they go out of scope when they will no longer pointer at something. When that's impractical, it can be useful to set them to NULL (0), so that if you're monitoring the executing program in a debugger you can tell the pointer isn't meant to point to legitimate data at that point.

Upvotes: 3

bta
bta

Reputation: 45087

Memory management is not something that you can easily visualize while you are programming. Instead, it refers to how your program is allocating and freeing memory while it is running. Many debuggers will provide a way to halt a program while it is running and view information about the dynamic memory that it has allocated. You can plan your classes and interfaces with proper memory management techniques, but it's not as simple as "hit this button for a chart of your memory usage".

You can also implement something like this to keep track of your memory allocations and warn you about anything that your program didn't free. A garbage collector can free you from some of the hassles associated with memory management.

Upvotes: 0

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