Nobody said to manually write stack unwinding code or to only use malloc() and pair each of them with free().
There are other very good solutions that involve explicit structure. For example
- do not free things at all, just reserve a big chunk of address space and let the OS populate it as needed. When the process quits the OS frees everything automatically.
- do the same thing for parts of the program but implement the "OS part" in the program itself. There are variations of this known by terms such as "memory arena" or "pools". Basically, just take care to group allocations by end of lifetime. Then you can free everything in one go without tracking each lifetime individually in a stack frame (which is insane).
There are other very good solutions that involve explicit structure. For example
- do not free things at all, just reserve a big chunk of address space and let the OS populate it as needed. When the process quits the OS frees everything automatically.
- do the same thing for parts of the program but implement the "OS part" in the program itself. There are variations of this known by terms such as "memory arena" or "pools". Basically, just take care to group allocations by end of lifetime. Then you can free everything in one go without tracking each lifetime individually in a stack frame (which is insane).