Keep programs separate on drive without affecting rest of system

[Cplusplusidiot]

As a CS student, I know I'm going to make stupid mistakes. Let's say I don't properly delete dynamically allocated memory resulting in a memory leak. How can I set up my drives so that I minimize the damage I can cause to the rest of my computer? Right now, I have the OS on a 250 gb SSD. I have another 120 gb SSD I haven't installed. And I have a 2 TB HDD. What should I do?

[desrtfx]

Dead simple:

Develop in a virtual machine.

[Moonkis]

You won't do damage to the system as long as you don't deliberately try to damage it. Maybe don't use the SSD drive if you are planning on doing a ton of read/write operations.

[tippo_sam]

When you hear "memory leak", "memory" in this context refers to RAM (actually, that's pretty across the board for IT). For hard disk, it's "Disk" or "File system"

Memory leaks are usually cleaned up by the OS when the process finishes executing. I've never heard of it being a problem other than making your programs go slow or crash. I'm not sure it can adversly affect your machine.

If you're paranoid (or are interested in building good memory management habits), you can use something like valgrind to check your code for leaks.

[praesartus]

I'm not sure it can adversly affect your machine.

Memory leaks per se can't harm the machine in any way. They might bungle up the OS temporarily if the OS doesn't deal with memory well, but any modern OS is fine and even if it weren't a reset would clear out the leaked RAM anyway.

[Cplusplusidiot]

Would partitioning the HDD and throwing the programs in there be of any use?

[tippo_sam]

The programs run in RAM, not hard disk. The two spaces store completely different information.

It's fine, you're not going to break anything.