In C++, memory management is generally a responsibility of the software developers. This is because C++ standard does not enforce garbage collection support in C++ compiler; hence, it is left to the compiler vendor's choice. Exceptionally, the Sun C++ compiler comes with a garbage collection library named libgc.

C++ language has many powerful features. Of these, needless to say, pointers is one of the most powerful and useful features. Having said pointers are very useful, they do come with their own weird issues, hence they must be used responsibly. When memory management is not taken seriously or not done quite right, it leads to many issues, including application crashes, core dumps, segmentation faults, intermittent difficulties to debug issues, performance issues, and so on. Dangling pointers or rogue pointers sometimes mess with other unrelated applications while the culprit application executes silently; in fact, the victim application might be blamed many times. The worst part about memory leaks is that at certain times it gets really tricky and even experienced developers end up debugging the victim code for countless hours while the culprit code is left untouched. Effective memory management helps avoid memory leaks and lets you develop high-performance applications that are memory efficient. 

As the memory model of every operating system varies, every OS may behave differently at a different point in time for the same memory leak issue. Memory management is a big topic, and C++ offers many ways to do it well. We'll discuss some of the useful techniques in the following sections.