Excuse me for a second, I am going to get very technical.
For those that want the tldr version: If you do not program right, you can ruin your hard drive quickly.
My background is in Computer Engineering and so I have my years of experience in low-level languages. One of the best features that I saw huge use for in my first year was in using C++ with pointers.
The hope is that you can use less processing power of locating, accessing, and then releasing memory by doing the foundational work yourself instead of using API functions that have lots of processing overhead. The concern is that if done wrong, you will loose your data and potentially corrupt your entire hard drive.
Now, to the devastation.