Working with Memory, Arrays, and Pointers

C++ allows you to have direct access to memory through pointers. This gives you a lot of flexibility, and potentially it allows you to improve the performance of your code by eliminating some unnecessary copying of data. However, it also provides an extra source of errors; some can be fatal for your application or worse (yes, worse than fatal!) because poor use of memory buffers can open security holes in your code that can allow malware to take over the machine. Clearly pointers are an important aspect of C++.

In this chapter, you'll see how to declare pointers and initialize them to memory locations, how to allocate memory on the stack and, C++ free store, and how to use C++ arrays.