In computer science, a memory leak is a type of resource leak that occurs when a computer program incorrectly manages memory allocations in such a way that memory which is no longer needed is not released. In object-oriented programming, a memory leak may happen when an object is stored in memory but cannot be accessed by the running code. A memory leak has symptoms similar to a number of other problems (see below) and generally can only be diagnosed by a programmer with access to the program's source code.