As a competative programmer who basically never uses C++, I'm not really qualified to respond, but according to my friend Monogon deleting pointers is a waste of runtime; it will be cleaned up when the program ends anyway.

It's a lot like when you were little and you played with all of your toys in the living room and just left them on the floor when you went to sleep instead of putting them away. Somehow they magically get put away overnight. (Oddly enough when I no longer lived in the same house as my mother, this behavior seemed to have stopped, but I think it's just a bug in the current runtime that should hopefully be patched in the next version)

A nice way to use pointers without worrying about freeing memory is to just pre-allocate a large global pool of memory beforehand, and allocate memory from that pool.

This allocator from kactl is a good example of an allocator that does precisely this (to use it, just put this before any code you write, and any instance of new in your code should use this allocator instead, and you never need to call delete). Note that STL containers still allocate memory from the heap (to fix this, there is an STL version of the allocator in the same repo). It also tends to be much faster than the usual new or malloc for most CP-related usecases (credits to people in the AC Discord server who told me how to actually this allocator).