@Mole said: I remember we had someone who used to assign null to pointes to free them. The argument was that assigning null would inform the garbage collection that the memory was no longer referenced and thus freed. The only problem was that there was no garbage collection, it was Embedded C on an AVR micro which had 1KB of Flash.  Maybe he's just not used to working on embedded systems. That's a perfectly acceptable technique in normal C, since the OOM killer is a kind of garbage collector.