Dynamic memory and forced process closing

Destructors are not called, no, but since dynamic memory is managed by the OS, when your process dies, the operating system cleans everything up for you anyway (and same for most resources like file descriptors, sockets, etc..). That doesn't mean you should not care to free your memory before ending your program, you should always do it, because if you need to save your program's state to disk somehow, you'll have to make sure it's done because the operating system won't do that for you, but it does mean you need not worry about memory getting lost when your process is killed.

Actually, it depends what you mean by "forcing" the process to close. There's a big difference between an API like TerminateProcess() and ExitProcess() under Windows, for instance.

Does TerminateProcess() not release the pages of the target process?

Does TerminateProcess() not release the pages of the target process?

No, all virtual memory is released when the process is terminated (though the process may take a while to terminate as I/O is difficult to interrupt, at least under Windows). However the program (or attached libraries) may need to do special cleanup work which TerminateProcess() won't let them do, unlike ExitProcess().

Ah, gotcha.

Thank you. I was thi.king that dynamic memory was not enough safe because of that.