memory-safety-patterns

Use RAII to tie resource lifetimes to object scope and prefer smart pointers like unique_ptr and shared_ptr over raw new and delete. Containers such as std::vector and std::fstream release their resources automatically in destructors.

Rust's move semantics transfer ownership so the old binding becomes invalid, and the borrow checker rejects references that outlive their data. Lifetime annotations let the compiler verify reference validity at compile time.

Use unique_ptr for single ownership, which is the default and cheapest option. Use shared_ptr only when multiple owners genuinely share a resource, and pair it with weak_ptr to break reference cycles.

Use the goto-cleanup pattern so every allocation has a single cleanup path, or wrap resources in opaque create/destroy function pairs. GCC and Clang also support a cleanup attribute that frees variables at scope exit.

AddressSanitizer catches use-after-free and overflows at runtime, Valgrind detects leaks and invalid accesses, and ThreadSanitizer finds data races. For Rust, Miri detects undefined behavior in unsafe code.

Rust prevents data races at compile time through the Send and Sync traits. Use Arc with Mutex or RwLock for shared mutable state across threads, and atomic types like AtomicI32 for simple counters.