This article goes over the spicy topic of object ownership. We covered the lifetime quirks, and we found out that manual memory management can be a nightmare, we new and delete in the correct order. There must be something better than that. Well, there is but it comes with its own can of worms.

Object Ownership

By Ilya Doroshenko

From the article:

Since we know the rules of new and delete, namely new allocates and delete destroys, we never really cared about who is responsible for the object. This caused a lot of confusion in the past. For instance, some API codes from Win32 return strings that should be LocalFree()d, like FormatMessage or GetEnvironmentStrings. POSIX, on the other hand, has strdup as a common example of you should free it yourself. This model is confusing because you may have a lot of return statements, before which you should always call free or delete, depending on the operation. However, we have RAII since the very beginning of C++, which adds constructors and destructors. So, in 1998 resourceful people decided to add auto_ptr to the standard.

The premise was simple:

• a simple explicit constructor, that took raw pointer from new
• destroyed by either an explicit release/reset or a destructor on the end of the block

This was the first attempt at a structured cleanup. As time passed, the initial point began to crumble. More issues arose and the question came up: Who owns the data?