An object-oriented language that enforces many practices of good software engineering. As one example, it supports constructors and destructors for datatypes. These mechanisms provide a compact way of managing memory within instances of the type, thus avoiding many of the problems associated with memory leaks and pointers in C.

The type of memory allocation provided by the C functions malloc and realloc. Heap-based allocation is often called dynamic storage allocation. This allows a program to request more memory as it needs it rather than allocating a fixed amount at compile time.