You shouldn't new or malloc unless you need to. The more you allocate the more you leak. Just stack/automatically allocate the resource and take the address wi

You shouldn't new or malloc unless you need to. The more you allocate the more you leak. Just stack/automatically allocate the resource and take the address with & then pass the pointer around. Because the data is automatically cleaned up you know you won't have any leaks (and certain whole other classes of bugs). EDIT - Consider: int myDictLen = 0; int* myDictLenPtr = &myDictLen; /* now you can pass around the pointer myDictLenPtr to functions that can used an int* and it will be available in this scope and automatically cleaned up for you. */