How to solve a memory leak issue?

Question

C++ / C#

The crux of the matter is what are the options to avoid memory leaks.
As an example, here is an implementation of xor with a memory leak:

TYK

wchar_t* xorCipher(const wchar_t* toEncrypt) {
  HANDLE hHeap = GetProcessHeap();
  if (hHeap != NULL) {
    const int size = _wcslen(toEncrypt);
    wchar_t* result = (wchar_t*)HeapAlloc(hHeap, HEAP_ZERO_MEMORY, sizeof(wchar_t) * size);
    if (result != NULL) {
      for (int i = 0; i != _wcslen(toEncrypt) + 1; i++) {
        result[i] = toEncrypt[i] ^ (wchar_t)key;
      }
    }
    return result;
  }
}

The problem is that we need to give a pointer to an array of characters, I know that this is generally not correct and everything else is of interest to solutions to this issue.

PS wstring and more is not an option because of NODEFAULTLIB. The first thing that came to mind was to write a class, a wrapper over wchar__t*, are there any other options?

Answer 1

Read about smart pointers

Answer 2

I agree with the comment above.

#include <memory>
shared_ptr
unique_ptr