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When a C/C++ program containing the dynamically allocated memory(using malloc/new) without free/delete calls is terminated, what happens to that dynamically allocated memory? Does the operating system takes back the memory or does that memory becomes unaccessible to other programs?
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The memory is reclaimed by the Operating system once your program exits. The OS doesn't understand that your program leaked memory, it simply allocates memory to the program for running and once the program exits it reclaims that memory.
If you allocate memory and doesn't free it up, it's of no use while the program execution continues. This is called memory leak.
Dynamic memory allocation is the process of assigning the memory space during the execution time or the run time. Reasons and Advantage of allocating memory dynamically: When we do not know how much amount of memory would be needed for the program beforehand.
As a result, this dynamically allocated integer can not be deleted. This is called a memory leak. Memory leaks happen when your program loses the address of some bit of dynamically allocated memory before giving it back to the operating system.
I don't think that there are any guarantees in the language standard, but modern operating systems which support sparse virtual memory and memory protection (such as MacOS X, Linux, all recent version of Windows, and all currently manufactured phone handsets) automatically clean up after badly-behaved processes (when they terminate) and free the memory for you. The memory remains unavailable, however as long as the program is running.
If you're programming on microcontrollers, on MacOS 9 or earler, DOS, or Windows 3.x, then you might need to be concerned about memory leaks making memory permenantly unavailable to the whole operating system.
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