Coming from a C# background, I have only vaguest idea on memory management on C++-- all I know is that I would have to free the memory manually. As a result my C++ code is written in such a way that objects of the type std::vector, std::list, std::map are freely instantiated, used, but not freed.

I didn't realize this point until I am almost done with my programs, now my code is consisted of the following kinds of patterns:

struct Point_2
{
    double x;
    double y;

};

struct Point_3
{
    double x;
    double y;
    double z;

};

list<list<Point_2>> Computation::ComputationJob(list<Point_3>    pts3D, vector<Point_2>    vectors)
{

    map<Point_2, double> pt2DMap=ConstructPointMap(pts3D);
    vector<Point_2> vectorList = ConstructVectors(vectors);
    list<list<Point_2>> faceList2D=ConstructPoints(vectorList , pt2DMap);
    return faceList2D;
}

My question is, must I free every.single.one of the list usage ( in the above example, this means that I would have to free pt2DMap, vectorList and faceList2D)? That would be very tedious! I might just as well rewrite my Computation class so that it is less prone to memory leak.

Any idea how to fix this?