Comment by coherentpony

... mostly. Much like in a garbage collected language, you need to make sure you are no longer referencing things when you want resources to be freed, but it does make the worst case much harder to run into.

RAII. [1]

Stack allocated objects have their memory freed in C. Other resources are not released.

Consider the following C, with and without gcc extensions:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <malloc.h>
    #include <fcntl.h>
    #include <unistd.h>

    #ifndef GCC_EXTENSIONS
    #define GCC_EXTENSIONS 1
    #endif

    int main() {
        {
            #if GCC_EXTENSIONS
            void close_fd(int *fdp) {
                if(*fdp >= 0) close(*fdp);
            }
            #else
            #define __attribute__(...)
            #endif
    
            int fd __attribute__((cleanup(close_fd))) = -1;
    
            fd = open("somefile", O_CREAT | O_WRONLY, 0644);
    
            system("ls /proc/self/fd");
        }
    
        system("ls /proc/self/fd");
    }

with gcc extensions:

    0 1 2 3 4
    0 1 2 3

without gcc extensions:

    0 1 2 3 4
    0 1 2 3 4

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initial...