Glossary: Heap

OO codes are dynamic with objects being created and destroyed as required by the task in hand. Objects require memory to hold their data members. For objects created dynamically there are two sources:-

The stack - for short-lived objects
The heap - for permanent objects.

The heap is a reserve area of memory with a manager that allocates memory for an object's lifetime. The new operator gets memory from the heap manager and the delete operator returns it. The lifetime of a heap allocated object is only limited by the lifetime of the application. For objects that only exist within a function, or generally any compound statement stack memory is better as its has a smaller allocation overhead.

See OO Concepts:Constructors & Destructors

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