How does memory leak happen in C language? In my understanding suppose If we have only 8 bytes of memory and the program tries to store three integers, each occupying 4 bytes, Thats memory leak. does that result in a memory leak? What are your thoughts on this?

 

Kind of depending on how you got the memory in the first place. Memory leaks happen in the process of dynamic storage allocation. Usually this is the result of mismanaging pointers leading to a situation where you have pointers to memory that you have freed or memory that you have not allocated. Read the wiki for further information.

Memory leak - Wikipedia

 

A memory leak is when you fail to free all the memory you allocate. Running out of memory may or may not be due to leaks.

 

In my understanding suppose If we have only 8 bytes of memory and the program tries to store three integers, each occupying 4 bytes, Thats memory leak. does that result in a memory leak?

That's not what a memory leak is.

A memory leak occurs when you don't manage memory you allocate correctly (and you're not using a language that does garbage collection for you).

 

How does memory leak happen in C language? In my understanding suppose If we have only 8 bytes of memory and the program tries to store three integers, each occupying 4 bytes, Thats memory leak. does that result in a memory leak? What are your thoughts on this?

What you describe is not a memory leak. If you try to store 12 bytes of data when you only have 8 bytes available, you have simply un out of memory. The details depend on where you try to store those three integers. If allocated 8 bytes for an array of integers intended to hold two values and you try to store three there, you have a buffer overflow. The behavior when you do that is undefined. If your process only has eight bytes assigned to it and you try to write outside that space (and you are running under a modern operating system) the OS will kill your program for committing a segmentation fault.

A memory leak happens when you allocate memory and then fail to deallocate it before changing the value of the pointer that used to point to it.

 

Kind of depending on how you got the memory in the first place. Memory leaks happen in the process of dynamic storage allocation. Usually this is the result of mismanaging pointers leading to a situation where you have pointers to memory that you have freed or memory that you have not allocated. Read the wiki for further information.

Memory leak - Wikipedia

Pointers to memory that has been freed is not a memory leak, but rather a dangling pointer (aka, a wild pointer). It is essentially the exact opposite of a memory leak. Both are examples of memory safety violations.