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A running μScheme program continually allocates fresh locations. How are they supplied? Memory is limited, and malloc will eventually run out. Memory can be recovered using free, but if a programmer must call free, as in C and C++, they risk memory errors: leaks, locations that are freed multiple times, and misuse of freed locations (so-called dangling-pointer errors). Memory errors can make a program crash—or, worse, silently produce wrong answers. But in languages like μScheme, full Scheme, Java, and JavaScript, which are memory-safe, such errors are impossible. The errors are prevented because the implementation of μScheme, not the μScheme programmer, figures out when it is safe to reuse a location. The techniques used to reuse locations safely are demonstrated in this chapter.
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