Foundations of Programming - Karl Seguin

Chapter 7 - Back to Basics: Memory
When we exit our main function (forget the fact that the program will stop), our stack pops off all local
values, meaning both the x and y values are lost. This is significant because the memory allocated on the
heap still contains our string, but we've lost all references to it (there's no pointer pointing back to it). In
C or C++ this results in a memory leak - without a reference to our heap address we can't free up the
memory. In C# or Java, our trusty garbage collector will detect the unreferenced object and free it up.
We'll look at a more complex examples, but aside from having more arrows, it's basically the same.
public class Employee
{
private int _employeeId;
private Employee _manager;
public int EmployeeId
{
get { return _employeeId; }
set { _employeeId = value; }
}
public Employee Manager
{
get { return _manager; }
set { _manager = value; }
}
public Employee(int employeeId)
{
_employeeId = employeeId;
}
}
public class Test
{
private Employee _subordinate;
}
void DoSomething()
{
Employee boss = new Employee(1);
_subordinate = new Employee(2);
_subordinate.Manager = _boss;
}
Foundations of Programming Copyright © Karl Seguin www.codebetter.com
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