Comment by adrian_b

In my opinion, the "manual" memory management, introduced by the IBM PL/I programming language by the end of 1964, and inherited by C and other languages, i.e. where the programmer is responsible for invoking "free", was a serious mistake and it was an obsolete technique already at the date of its introduction.

When the explicit "free" was invented, automatic memory reclamation while avoiding the non-determinism of garbage collectors had already been known for 4 years, since 1960, when another IBM employee had invented reference counting (as a reaction to the garbage collector of LISP I).

When implemented naively, reference counting has some disadvantages, but those can be circumvented relatively easily in an optimized implementation. The book discussed in the parent article also has a chapter about reference counting.

I have written C programs for many decades, but I have never invoked "free" directly, because I have always used reference counts. I have never encountered a circumstance when I would have wanted to invoke "free" directly.

C has the disadvantage that the compiler will not do implicitly things like virtual function invocation, reference counts handling etc. but any such techniques that are provided by higher-level languages can still be used in a language like C, even if they require more boilerplate code.

I do not like the "shared_ptr" implementation of reference counting in C++, because that data type is not directly usable in places where a plain reference or pointer is expected. Implementations that do not have this problem exist.