From the course: Programming Foundations: Memory, Pointers, and Garbage Collection

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Deallocating memory

Deallocating memory - Python Tutorial

From the course: Programming Foundations: Memory, Pointers, and Garbage Collection

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Deallocating memory

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- [Instructor] The releasing of a piece of memory and making it available again is called deallocation. For the stack, this is sort of easy. When a function is done, the stack memory that was holding the variables for the function gets released by the system and pointer of the stack or called stack goes down by one to the previously called function. For the heap, this is slightly more complicated. First of all, the heap memory gets fragmented by this process. When the heap memory is reserved, blocks are reserved in a sequence. Releasing blocks makes the heap fragmented. And this means that finding a memory space for a bigger type can be tough since it may not fit in the gap and the allocator could have to add it to the end or defragment the heap. All of this actually depends on the system and the logic of the allocate of the language that you're using. But this is not all. In some situations, it's easy. For example…

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