Using Destructors

Our journey to a better and deeper understanding of memory management in C++ now emerges into the world of clean code and contemporary practices. In previous chapters we have explored fundamental concepts of in-memory representation (what are objects, references, pointers, and so on), what pitfalls await us if we stray from sound programming practices in inappropriate ways, and how we can lie to the type system in a controlled and disciplined manner, all of which will be helpful in the rest of this book. We will now discuss fundamental aspects of resource management in our language; memory being a special kind of resource, the ideas and techniques found in this chapter will help us write clean and robust code, including code that performs memory management tasks.

C++ is a programming language that supports (among other paradigms) object-oriented programming, but with actual objects. This sounds like a jest of sorts, but it’s actually a true statement: many...