3 ms·

Others have already mentioned that it isn't really necessary, but for some historical context this wasn't always true. When I first started programming compute

Others have already mentioned that it isn't really necessary, but for some historical context this wasn't always true. When I first started programming computers, apps (written in languages that aren't garbage collected) on your typical consumer level computer/OS had to be really careful with freeing up all allocated memory before exiting or that memory would be gone forever (as far as the OS was concerned when it came to reallocating it to other apps) until the user rebooted the computer. Advances coming from the combination of more advanced operating systems and CPU features like MMUs have made this a non-issue in most cases (can still be an issue on embedded, etc).

mnw21cam 12y ago
This was a particular problem on the Amiga system, among others. There were attempts to retro-fit resource tracking to the OS, but this was made all-but-impossible by the fact that a process can malloc() a chunk of memory, write a message in it, and then hand a pointer to that message to another process, expecting the other process to dealloc() it. This made for wonderfully cheap inter-process communication (for instance, the filesystem would load blocks from disc and pass them as messages to the process wanting them).