C++ Object Instantiation

Question

I'm a C programmer trying to understand C++. Many tutorials demonstrate object instantiation using a snippet such as:

Dog* sparky = new Dog();

which implies that later on you'll do:

delete sparky;

which makes sense. Now, in the case when dynamic memory allocation is unnecessary, is there any reason to use the above instead of

Dog sparky;

and let the destructor be called once sparky goes out of scope?

Thanks!

Answer 1

On the contrary, you should always prefer stack allocations, to the extent that as a rule of thumb, you should never have new/delete in your user code.

As you say, when the variable is declared on the stack, its destructor is automatically called when it goes out of scope, which is your main tool for tracking resource lifetime and avoiding leaks.

So in general, every time you need to allocate a resource, whether it's memory (by calling new), file handles, sockets or anything else, wrap it in a class where the constructor acquires the resource, and the destructor releases it. Then you can create an object of that type on the stack, and you're guaranteed that your resource gets freed when it goes out of scope. That way you don't have to track your new/delete pairs everywhere to ensure you avoid memory leaks.

The most common name for this idiom is RAII

Also look into smart pointer classes which are used to wrap the resulting pointers on the rare cases when you do have to allocate something with new outside a dedicated RAII object. You instead pass the pointer to a smart pointer, which then tracks its lifetime, for example by reference counting, and calls the destructor when the last reference goes out of scope. The standard library has std::unique_ptr for simple scope-based management, and std::shared_ptr which does reference counting to implement shared ownership.

Many tutorials demonstrate object instantiation using a snippet such as ...

So what you've discovered is that most tutorials suck. ;) Most tutorials teach you lousy C++ practices, including calling new/delete to create variables when it's not necessary, and giving you a hard time tracking lifetime of your allocations.