Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime

Phase: Implementation

Strategy: Libraries or Frameworks

Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.

For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.

When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC).

To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

Phase: Architecture and Design

Use an abstraction library to abstract away risky APIs. Not a complete solution.

Phase: Architecture and Design; Build and Compilation

The Boehm-Demers-Weiser Garbage Collector or valgrind can be used to detect leaks in code.