In C++, memory management is generally a responsibility of the software developers. This is because C++ standard does not enforce garbage collection support in C++ compiler; hence, it is left to the compiler vendor's choice. Exceptionally, the Sun C++ compiler comes with a garbage collection library named libgc.
C++ language has many powerful features. Of these, needless to say, pointers is one of the most powerful and useful features. Having said pointers are very useful, they do come with their own weird issues, hence they must be used responsibly. When memory management is not taken seriously or not done quite right, it leads to many issues, including application crashes, core dumps, segmentation faults, intermittent difficulties to debug issues, performance issues, and so on. Dangling pointers or rogue pointers sometimes mess with other unrelated applications...