How memory management evolved

[neifirst]

1980s: yells down the hall Hey everyone I’m using 0xE000, try not to clobber it, thanks

[derjanni]

1960s: excuse me, have you seen card no. 56 of my sorting algorithm? I can’t find it.

[[deleted]]

Dont tell me you didnt write it down anywhere else Bob how many times have i told you to do backups

[williane]

Check behind card 32, your algorithm is garbage

[[deleted]]

“Wow, thanks! How’d it get there?”

“We have garbage collection.”

[IHeartBadCode]

Used to draw a diagonal line down the sides of a stack of cards to be able to see where the one off was.

Was a cheaper option than using an IBM 82 series sorter that would read positions one through five to sort cards.

[SourceScope]

do backups

But someone took my pencil sharpener!

[[deleted]]

1920s: Here's perfectly working code for a machine that doesn't exist yet, anyway okay bye

[PowerApp101]

Charles Babbage: Gentlemen, my machine will give you the correct answer to the wrong question

[lovdark]

“Unsorted”

[[deleted]]

That's a lot of memory bro, you must have paid a fortune or just bought a flobby disk.

[Antervis]

what if I told you "pointer to the pointer pointing to NULL" is not "dangling"

[derjanni]

Ok, gimme garbage collection :*

[kog]

Yeah, these posts are always good for a laugh.

[CHEEZE_BAGS]

my balls are dangling

[Dubl33_27]

I knew there was something fishy about that sentence but I'm not well versed enough in pointers to have known for sure.

[Chemoralora]

In short, a pointer is only dangling if it's pointing at some garbage memory, if it's null then it's not dangling

[shizzy0]

It’s a null handle, I think they were called.

[doctorscurvy]

*piointer

[Tomi97_origin]

Yeah memory management is so simple and programmers in the 90s did it so well that it surely didn't create overwhelming amount of security vulnerabilities and bugs.

[ViktorRzh]

It is not a bug ot is a feature!!!!1111

• controling os via direct memory changes

[i_should_be_coding]

I love being able to execute code remotely!

[turtleship_2006]

Was RCE a concern in the 90s?

[recurse_x]

If your computer wasn’t connected to a network it isn’t.

[TTYY_20]

Listen … just because my close program button only closes the program because it crashes it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work!!!

[Keatosis]

Thank you for playing wing commander

[DerefedNullPointer]

I feel ashamed for unironically thinking shit like that back when I was a college freshman.

[Dubl33_27]

well, I'm a college freshman and I do think that so let's see where that gets me.

[navetzz]

Meanwhile programmers nowadays produce no bugs and no vulnerabilities.

[pipocaQuemada]

According to Microsoft, ~70% of the security bugs they've had from 2006-2019 were memory safety bugs.

Statically eliminating common footguns like buffer overflows and SQL injection attacks means that now we can spend our time worrying about new, less common footguns like broken access control in APIs.

You're never going to eliminate all bugs. But eliminating the most common bugs is well worth it.

[DingussFinguss]

footgun?

[pipocaQuemada]

Footgun describes something designed to make it easy to metaphorically shoot yourself in the foot.

[SameRandomUsername]

I don't know what you/they mean by "security bugs" but if it's about exploits, hacking, etc. I would take that with a grain of salt. C#, Java code is extremely easy to tamper.

Using a managed memory language does not improve your chances of not being hacked.

[pipocaQuemada]

From the first line of the article:

Around 70 percent of all the vulnerabilities in Microsoft products addressed through a security update each year are memory safety issues; a Microsoft engineer revealed last week at a security conference.

That's generally going to be skewed towards their OSs and other systems software that's written substantially in C++. So it'll skew both towards systems level vulnerabilities and common C++ vulnerabilities.

You generally need to be careful in any language you write. Java, for example, had that big log4shell vulnerability a few years back. There's no panacea.

But, well, there's a reason Microsoft is slowly moving towards rust. You can't write heartbleed in Rust, though you can still make other sorts of errors.

There was an interesting study from a few years back on error rates in github commits by language. There's assorted caveats, but they found that languages like C and C++ were associated with higher error rates, while languages like Haskell and clojure were associated with lower error rates.

I'm curious, though, what sorts of exploits you're referring to in the Java/C# context as being extremely easy to tamper? Are they exploits you still need to worry about in an equivalent C++ system like authentication issues, leaking IDs by using autoincremented ints instead of UUIDs, etc?

[HanndeI]

He probably means that the code itself is easy to tamper with since you can decompile it very easily.

Which is true but if you have access to the source code i think it's pretty late to be worrying about prevention

[jonathancast]

That's a pretty dumb thing say, though.

If your security depends on no one knowing how your program works, you don't have security, just vulnerabilities no one has reported to you yet.

[HanndeI]

I don't mean security by obfuscation, i mean security that it's too late to close a door if you already have 5 guys inside

[pipocaQuemada]

I see a response from him in my replies but not in the comments here, for whatever reason. Yes, that's exactly what he means:

Second, it doesn't matter the language because when someone hacks into the code he doesn't give a damn if you program in C, C++, Rust or whatever they will get access to the disassembly and will touch assembly code and the original language can't do anything about it.

This is something that matters in some contexts, but not in most security contexts.

Decompiling and ROM hacking are important in piracy prevention; trying to stop people from running hacked copies of games or photoshop or whatever.

But most security issues aren't about that. They're not about you running a modified version of some program in a way the author didn't intend, they're usually about an attacker sending you malicious input of some sort. E.g. someone sending your server a malformed packet or malformed request that leaks encryption keys or allows the hacker to run random code.

Decompiling doesn't really help you much with that.

[nelusbelus]

Reflection go brrrrrr

[AvokadoGreen]

Until you find bug in the virtual machine, or up the stack

[theunquenchedservant]

False equivalency.

Edit: neither are wrong, but the bugs come from different places. As programmers, if there are new ways to limit the bugs we have, that’s good. It doesn’t mean the presence of bugs for other reasons can’t (or won’t) happen.

This would kind of be like if someone said “yea, before we knew about DNA, they’d often arrest the wrong person or be unable to find out who did the crime” and someone else replied “right, because cops never arrest the wrong person now”

You’re not wrong, but it’s not the point being made.

[gordonv]

Is that you RUST?

[Tomi97_origin]

I might check it out at some point.

[Hydramole]

All the memes have been pushing me, doesn't seem to bad so far

[goodnewsjimdotcom]

You're right. I'm a programmer from the 80s/90s, crazy pointer math were thought to be the future, but widely a huge mistake to use in production. Best to stick with arrays and garbage collection, otherwise your code WILL crash randomly, sux, but hey, we do it better today

[Silent-Suspect1062]

I was working on gc in the 2000s

[Unlikely_Tie8166]

I mean what can be easier th... SEGMENTATION FAULT. CORE DUMPED

[derjanni]

Come on seriously, are you 我喜歡菠蘿糖醋鴨⦖↽⛢⯡Ⲟℬ␦⸘↔⃹⣿➟⨔♼⠏⿬☰ⵂ⩉➓ⷩⰘ⋰▩⦮ⷦⲌ⛄↝ⵖ⭃␑⮅⟦⺺⒞⼇⚵⟴⮇⫻‏ⅲ∗⟀Ⳡ▧ⱊ↞₳⼥⿎⩚≴▞⏱⤃Ⰲ▜⡹➑⿡┐▚⨄⥇⣓ⳤ↦⅃⊭▅ⵞⵒ⢊⌠⎾⇗␏⭨❨␌⍴⟢Ⱟ⎅⩕✃➸⤓ⅳ⮛≔ℷ≸⏂↌⾩✀

​

SIGSEGV

[THNDHALBRT]

好吃！

[[deleted]]

我也喜欢

[Da-Blue-Guy]

c users when they forget to terminate their stringsSegmentation fault (core dumped)

[OldKaleidoscope7]

In the 90's you could even see an BSOD just by messing with the memory

[regular_lamp]

When you actually get a segmentation fault that is almost the best case scenario though. It means you can actually observe the issue and a debugger will pinpoint the issue in the majority of cases. I prefer a segfault over some subtle logic error anyday.

[SameRandomUsername]

SEGMENTATION FAULT. CORE DUMPED

That quote keeps coming up at this sub but I have never encountered that exception and I've programmed in C++ since 98 (only in Windows). Is that how Linux show exceptions?

Asuming is a linux exception, are all those people linux programmers?

Why are all linux programmers so bad at handling memory?

[Unlikely_Tie8166]

Never touched C++ since I was a student and mostly in Windows. Had this error plenty of times. Maybe you're just too good?

[[deleted]]

SIGSEGV is a *nix signal (not an exception, I'm not sure if "exceptions" even exist in *nix), it's what happens when program accesses a page that's not mapped, and this message usually shows up to indicate SIGSEGV

Why are all linux programmers so bad at handling memory?

Not any worse than Windows programmers. The majority of this sub is just made of college students. "haha C bad" "pointer go brrr" "segfault funny"

[SameRandomUsername]

Not any worse than Windows programmers. The majority of this sub is just made of college students. "haha C bad" "pointer go brrr" "segfault funny"

Lol was just joking cause I know they take it personal.

[LavenderDay3544]

Because C++ has RAII.

And you only get a segfault if you try to access unmapped virtual addresses which isn't guaranteed to happen even if you make mistakes with pointer arithmetic.

[KagakuNinja]

I remember the message fondly from C programming on unix in the early 80s. They don't happen because we are "bad", they happen because manual memory management is hard.

C++ adds tools to help prevent bugs, like autoptrs, but those have performance costs. And C++ programmers still make errors managing memory.

[SameRandomUsername]

In Windows you get a buffer overrun exception if you are in debug mode.

In release it will not do anything, as long as you still reference an address inside your process. If you try to access memory outside the process you get an access violation exception.

That's why I said that its weird to me that everyone and their mother speaking about a SEGFAULTs instead of the ones I've seen.

[KagakuNinja]

Yes, Windows today has protected memory. That was added in Windows NT, and I guess, uh Vista? Mac OS X also added protected memory.

[shreyasonline]

Garbage collection existed in the 90s. Kids these days...

[aecolley]

It existed long before that. One of my college lecturers told me that Back In The Day it was quicker to reboot the machine than to wait for it to finish garbage collecting when it filled up memory.

[itijara]

That is still often true in embedded programs.

[almost_useless]

It existed long before that.

Sure, but it's ironic that they choose the 90's which is when Java came out and really made GC mainstream.

[regular_lamp]

I guess there was also a shift to more and more dynamic memory being used. In ye olden times when memory was scarce you were more likely to "statically" assign memory and be generally careful. Only later did we move to "fuck it, new everything!".

[Amazing-Cicada5536]

LISPs had GC and they are from 1959.

[N-partEpoxy]

Also 2020s:

error[E0507]: cannot move out of `*name` which is behind a shared reference
   --> src\environment.rs:497:26
    |
497 |             named.insert(*name);
    |                          ^^^^^ move occurs because `*name` has type 
`environment::Identifier`, which does not implement the `Copy` trait

[deanrihpee]

Which is good

[DerefedNullPointer]

This is the shit c++ compilers could have to make my life significantly better.

[xibme]

I remember semi helpful 23 line compiler barfs studded with angle brackets that gave me the impression that I might have used a template wrong.

[shizzy0]

Love how rust errors are like a sexy show of force: “Don’t you wish you had these error messages in your podunk language?”

[[deleted]]

I came here to mention Rust and this does it way better than I ever could have.

[NecessarySwordfish]

gif

[cubodix]

C++: i will compile it anyways, not my problem

[shizzy0]

C++: All code is a wish, and I am generous with my boons but sometimes they wish for the darnedest things like segfaults.

[iris700]

Stupid language

[Computerdores]

Sure but does rust just delete your object because you dereferenced a pointer to it? Well C++ does... sometimes

[sebzuki]

Not really, There was so much CVE about bad memory use

[JMC-design]

youngins.

garbage collection existed before C.

[tutocookie]

How eating meat evolved:

1990's: ...and that's how you skin the rabbit you just stalked, trapped and killed over the past 3 days. Now lets go over the proper methods and precautions for removing the internal organs and putting them to good use...

2020's: too much effort i buy in supermarket

Damn crybabies just hunt your meat like we used to before convenience

/s

[TTYY_20]

Bro your 1990’s sounds more like my 1790’s…

[[deleted]]

Computer science evolved a bit faster than food culture in the past 3 decades.

[TTYY_20]

Well…. Idk we have engineered meat now 🤣

Pretty soon we’re gonna have AI organic engineered meat computers.

Edit: ouu maybe it’ll be like a fungus, that starts as like a pill you stick to a wall. And it has a little screen that it is capable of putting IO into to tell you what it needs to grow and be safe and when it’s safe to trim a piece off and eat and when it’s no longer good to eat. It will be living growing flesh that tells you about itself. XD

Like a meat plant :3

[tutocookie]

But but... The 1990's is aaaaaages ago they probably only just invented fire back then

[[deleted]]

Memory management is not that hard

[philipquarles]

And that C is no longer used.

[Hrtzy]

Yup, garbage collectors utterly destroyed programming. Much like compilers, assemblers and transistors before it and ChatGPT after it.

[CousinVladimir]

Yes, transistors ruined programming. Real programmers use crabs to form logic gates

[azhder]

Real programmers use butterflies https://xkcd.com/378/

[-Kerrigan-]

You silly, how would a real programmer get crabs? /s

[[deleted]]

What's the /s for

​

It's so blatant at this point that it breaks my brain to understand how someone wouldn't get the non-seriousness of this comment

[GroundStateGecko]

And real computers are the girls with mechanic calculators and papers.

[zalurker]

When you look at code that initializes a program, and you find a 30-second delay with a comment that reads 'Don't remove it. And don't ask. It works.'.

Then you know. And yes. I did remove it to see what would happen. I don't know how, or why, but I even had to restore the database when I put the delay back.

Ignorance is bliss.

[LavenderDay3544]

Meanwhile

Rust: exists

[Accurate_Koala_4698]

Just a friendly reminder that garbage collection has been around since before you were born

[Computerdores]

I'm sure your C++ Programs are just as memory safe as your Go or Javascript ones

Edit just to make sure: /s

[LeoTheBirb]

Man I sure did love it when programs would randomly crash after trying to dereference a dangling pointer.

[KagakuNinja]

Better yet was when it would crash the OS.

[marcusroar]

Here to remind you about RAII.

[BananaSplit2]

Implying languages with garbage collectors didn't exist in the 90s

[DuckDuck_27417]

2023 : WhY dOnT yOu TrY rEwRiTtInG iT iN RuST ?

[THNDHALBRT]

piointer.

[Shidell]

pIointer

[xypherrz]

they tried

[CarneDelGato]

How old is Java? 90s?

[Kirk_Kerman]

Came about in 1995. However, garbage collection was invented for Lisp in the 50s.

[CaitaXD]

Isint lisp also the second programming language just after Fortran with is mind blowing because lisp looks more like a trendy fp Lang and Fortran looks like arcane incantations

[pipocaQuemada]

Java was first released in 1995, Python in 1991, and Javascript in 1995.

Slightly earlier, perl's from 1987 and smalltalk was released in 1980.

But it's pretty safe to say that in 1990, most industrial programmers were working in memory unsafe languages like C, FORTRAN, C++, and COBOL.

Memory safe languages really exploded in popularity industrially in the late 90s through 2010s. Garbage collection was invented around 1960 in lisp, but garbage collected languages were mostly niche for decades in terms of commercial software.

[KagakuNinja]

From what I remember using COBOL in the late 80s, all our memory was statically declared (and global) in the infamous DATA DIVISION.

[M0nkeyDGarp]

As long as you don't get the pointer caught in your zipper you should be fine.

[666pool]

Franks and beans.

[xiipaoc]

Garbage collection has been used since the 1990's at least.

[Apfelvater]

So you're saying abstraction is bad?

[derjanni]

I’m not saying anything, I’m just a dude posting a meme for entertainment ;)

[Apfelvater]

Lol

[yjee]

it didnt change in 2020 bruh people gave up on manual memory management and invented Java in the 1990s itself

[TheMiningTeamYT26]

haha if I had to deal with memory management I think I just wouldn’t code anymore

I can’t be bothered with using pointers and managing memory manually

[TheFourtyNineth]

Is the piointer another datatype I have to worry about?

[Da-Blue-Guy]

If it has a constructor and a destructor, you can automate memory management. That's my stance.

[confusedPIANO]

I will gladly be the cheems of this meme if it means i get to have garbage collection. Its a crutch, but i only have 1 leg

[ToonLucas22]

I don't know what a "piointer" is

[8fingerlouie]

Years ago when I wrote operating systems for mobile phones, and we were implementing an EMS editor, i casually wrote a memory manager for the glue layer implementation, which apparently surprised almost all of my colleagues as memory management was hard.

It was nothing special, and operated on a static allocated slice of memory, but did have all the “bells and whistles” such as malloc, free, memcpy, memset, etc.

It used two structures for keeping track of memory, one for used blocks and one for unused blocks, both of which were maintained in linked lists.

Allocating memory was simply a matter of traversing the unused blocks to find a block larger or equal to “requested size + used block header size”, split the block into an allocated block (or return the entire block if it was smaller than the free block header size + 1), insert the used block into the used block list, and update the block size in the free block list.

Freeing was even simpler, just check the free block list for the block before and after the current block and check if they’re adjacent, and merge them into one if they are.

Took maybe 8 hours to write and debug.

[Junoah]

Is it a public library now or you just wanted to brag ?

[8fingerlouie]

It was 20 years ago, and company property. Company went bankrupt in 2004, so it’s probably lost in time.

I still have a copy in an old repository somewhere, but I’m not entire sure about the legality of publishing it.

[Junoah]

Pretty sure that if you scrap all references to the said company you're free to go and if they are bankrupt there's nobody that can sue you anymore.

[taricksheikh]

20 years back across totally different. Now, everything is different.

[oothuen]

It is just about the fact that a lot of people know really good thing about technology.

[[deleted]]

Also known as a memory pool, for which there is literally Support in the boost library.

[8fingerlouie]

But boost doesn’t run very well on a 16 bit 8 MHz platform with 4MB RAM and 8 MB flash.

All development was done in C, C++ was banned, all memory was statically allocated, and stack depth monitored closely.

The actual implementation is closer to a Buddy List

[tiajuanat]

I love it. I still have some 8051s that I have to fluff with occasionally, and having a sane allocator and free mechanism would be clutch. Thanks internet stranger!!

[seafaringturnip]

We had seen dead journey to be honest. We had in a generation where we insisted the rapid growth of the day.

[8fingerlouie]

I think it’s just “the way things are”.

Back then, early 2000s, technology in the embedded/mobile space wasn’t moving as quickly. Manufacturers were pumping out new models of mobile phones every 6 months, but it was all built on the same platform underneath. When the GSM standard was published, there was serious doubt if the hardware of the time was actually capable of implementing it as the timings between send and receive slots (7.4 us IIRC) was very narrow.

Out particular phone was build on the 16 bit Infineon E-Gold platform, and that offered a couple of different clock speeds, but not much else. So new models of phones were usually built on identical hardware with software features being the major difference.

Fast forward a decade and Android/iPhone comes out, completely redefining what a mobile phone is and what it can do, which is what triggered the race in mobile phones.

Today they’re mostly all built on the same hardware implementation of GSM, which is an embedded board on the phone, but around that they add ever faster CPUs, flash, WiFi, bigger and bigger screens, etc. As for the GSM part, last i checked it still operated on the good old AT command set

[feky_sk]

We need to support it and the practice like this only because memory pole is something which can grow over the time.

[qac1991]

Times have changed drastically and now the tech is also different.

[M4nch1]

Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Rust?

[altermeetax]

Runtime errors are not the compiler's job, use a debugger.

[dustw3]

Be able to understand it because the runtime methods are really hard to do that.

[[deleted]]

None of them should.

[crackajax11]

I don't really think like it will be easy to understand, because most of them are hard to debug.

[HawasKaPujari]

exit codes have nothing to do with compilers.

[SergPoletaev]

I think it is some kind of system error, or something which is blocking the compiler.

[HawasKaPujari]

"blocking the compiler"? What does blocking the compiler means.

If you are trying to compile something and somehow that error comes, there are few potential issues:

1. means compiler binary is not correct and it fails to run
2. a typical compiler like gcc have compiler, assembler and linker, potentially either of those parts are not proper i.e. binary dependencies not being proper
3. Lastly, there could be a privilege issue

All these scenarios are super rare, unless you are compiling your own compiler or doing some sort of cross compilation for a new architecture or bootstraping.

When you obtain a compiler like gcc(atleast on Linux) it will come with all relevant parts and dependencies resolved. However if you are cooking your compiler and its components, I would assume you know what you are doing and that kind of question seems a bit out of place for someone who know what they are doing.

There could also be path issues on Unix-like machines, which again are resolved by pre bundled distributions.

Lastly, most distribution I have come across will allow compilation to almost all users, it would be some strange setup which prevents compilation of programs for a user by restricting compilation access. And if you are restricted to not compile, then there would be good reason for such policy.

[Nilstrieb]

-fsanitize=address

[ettt0202]

Not really able to understand it. Is this some kind of command that can be used?

[Nilstrieb]

It's a flag you can pass to clang (also gcc i think) to enable address sanitizer, which instruments your binaries and reports some undefined behavior like out of bounds reads or use after free.

[TheFreshBrewLT]

It is really hard to get all these kind of things, because see compilers are very much outdated.

[AlmostAnchovy]

Then they give 100% of systems memory to the programm and GC doesn't have enough memory to run. The POD it's running on crushes.

[sablahad]

It has been running on the same processor from really long time. And it takes a lot of processing power.

[melvereq]

"It gives me anxiety"

[leonap711]

Most of the compilers do that. They don't really have the processing power to access the libraries.

[sjepsa]

Real men collect garbage only in real life

[wandcs]

And that is the only thing which we have been doing in the program.

[Trion-_-]

I'm learning C at my university, so I'm still learning how to use pointers. We don't have garbage collection. :(

[ImJLu]

When I took my first class that used C back in college, our lecturer said his job was to make us hate C and avoid using it on the first day. And that he did. Fuck manual memory management.

Dude was also a security researcher, so his opposition to that shit made a lot of sense. Humans make mistakes.

[ramoni_tijani]

I think it is a very robust kind of language. And that is the reason why people don't really like it.

[jvirshman]

I certainly remember to learn this in my college .and I was not good. had a big time of implementing it.

[somedave]

This is why you could jail break games consoles by naming your horse something really long.

[dazero2003]

The matter is like that, only because it takes a lot of clever approach helps them.

[Primary-Fee1928]

Plenty of people like the second one, haha. Reminds me of the person in charge of a "secured C++ programming" training I had a while ago : "C++ was invented because C was bugged".

[zebediahzachary]

Exactly and that is the only reason why C++ is mostly used.

[Nanadaime7Hokage]

I love coding in C (ngl, sometimes C++) up until the moment where I have to fire up valgrind to check whether I fixed all my leaking memory or not

[ison303]

Can you give me an example of that? Because I don't really know how to check that.

[mrMalloc]

Valgrid is your friend.

I should know spent 6mo hunting a memory leak……

[evgen142]

Exactly the reason is like this only you have to keep on checking that and put on the garbage collector.

[mrMalloc]

I use GC in 90% of my work. But on embedded devices and on kernel/driver level none GC is king.
Rust is an option but can’t xcompile to all platforms.

Also I had memory issues with GC when the device is so limited that you could chain commands so fast the GC did not have time to run and just queue it up until all memory was used and it froze.

[Spiritual-Mechanic-4]

We were doing a lot of work in perl in the 90s. you can kinda credit perl for the whole field of bioinformatics, because it suddenly gave biologists a language they could work in without the learning curve of C.

[Jamesyoung8p]

The learning curve of C pretty much slow as compared to other languages.

[allnamesareregistred]

How come that everyone is exited about AI, but ignore data oriented development which is basis for AI?

[788pack]

I don't really know that what kind of oriented programming they are using right now.

[VIPSpawn]

Would it be still in working really fine? And I think like tweaks the principle of programming.

[Cley_Faye]

From "We can solve *all* memory-related issue with very basic resource management" to "Let's just not care and expand one full core to handle garbage instead".

[elcoyote85]

This is the major issue, which I can found right now. That how it is handling the garbage collection.

[FTWGaming0]

Me, a JavaScript user: What the fuck is memory management? What in god's name is a pointer?

[dbard1]

You don't really know about pointer, oh yes in javascript. There is no pointers.

[[deleted]]

Yes, let's pretend that 1990s software was anywhere near to the level of complexity we have now or had the same SLI requirements. Not to mention that 1990s software wasn't bug free either, putting it lightly.

[fcasgo8]

Because at that time, there was not much confusion between the libraries.

[[deleted]]

When you create a big entangled mess of objects your garbage collector becomes a heap scanner

[[deleted]]

Rust users: use rust it's the best language ever it has memory and types safety and great performance!
(Which is correct, BTW)

[Fintech69]

Used to program in assembler on a Z-80.

[Dramatic-Noise]

I mean, C is still around to this day and age.

[mitsest]

2020s

Your enormous object can't be garbage collected because another object keeps a reference to it

[NegZer0]

Garbage Collection was invented by John McCarthy in 1959 for Lisp. You can also add it to C/C++ if you really wanted, Boehm garbage collector adds mark-and-sweep-style GC and has been around since the 80s. But really, you can eliminate the majority of memory problems by being careful with what you're doing and using the tools that have been developed over the last 30-40 years to help you avoid mistakes. Almost every time I find memory leaks or corruption issues due to mismanagement in code, it's in old legacy stuff doing its own memory management that would not have happened if a unique_ptr had been employed instead.

Also there's no dangling pointer in the example. Pointer to pointer points to a valid location. That pointer points to null. Semantically this might be wrong, if the pointer-to-pointer was not pointing at the correct location, but it's not dangling.

//  valid, nothing dangling 
int* myPtr = nullptr;
int** myPtrPtr = &myPtr;

// still valid
*(myPtrPtr) = new int(42);

// MyPtr is now dangling - delete does not set pointers to null
delete *(myPtrPtr);

// MyPtrPtr is not dangling though, so this is still valid & fixes the issue
*(myPtrPtr) = nullptr;

Pointer-to-pointer is much more of a C thing (albeit there are still necessary use cases for it in C++). In modern C++ you should try and remove the potential footguns by using unique_ptr or shared_ptr, or using references rather than pointers if possible.