A memory leak, in computer science (or leakage, in this context), occurs when a computer program acquires memory but fails to release it back to the operating system. In object-oriented programming, a memory leak may happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code. A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems (see below) and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program source code.
Because they can exhaust available system memory as an application runs, memory leaks are often the cause of or a contributing factor to software aging.
Read more about Memory Leak: Consequences, Programming Issues, RAII, Reference Counting and Cyclic References, Effects, Other Memory Consumers, A Simple Example in C
Famous quotes containing the words memory and/or leak:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“One leak will sink a ship: and one sin will destroy a sinner.”
—John Bunyan (1628–1688)