system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is the purpose of pointers in C/C++? What benefits do they provide?
gpt
Benefits compared to what?

Pointers are needed for any piece of code that need to dynamically allocate some amount of memory (since it needs to track the location of the allocated memory which may change from one run to an other depending on how much it needs to allocate and how much has already been allocated.)

An alternative is to simply never allocate memory and only use static buffers everywhere (which is unpractical for big and complex program).