A system for transparent local and distributed memory management overcomes the requirement of keeping track of whether a memory space allocated to a new object or a new program or data structure can be reclaimed. An autorelease pool is created at the beginning of a new duty cycle. The autorelease pool retains the newly allocated memory space during the duty cycle. The autorelease pool is automatically disposed of at the end of the duty cycle. As a result of disposing the autorelease pool, the newly allocated memory space is reclaimed (i.e., deallocated). This is useful in distributed networks where different programming conventions on remote and local machines made the memory management task particularly difficult. This is also useful in an object-oriented programming environment.