Question

Can anybody explain how to free memory of a static member Variable? In my understanding it can only be freed if all the instances of the class are destroyed. I am a little bit helpless at this point…

Some Code to explain it:

class ball
{
    private:
    static SDL_Surface *ball_image;
};
//FIXME: how to free static Variable?
SDL_Surface* ball::ball_image = SDL_LoadBMP("ball.bmp");

Answer 1

From the sound of it, you don’t really want a pointer at all. In fact, since this is coming from a factory function in a C library, it isn’t really a “first-class” C++ pointer. For example, you can’t safely delete it.

The real problem (if there is one) is to call SDL_FreeSurface on it before the program exits.

This requires a simple wrapper class.

struct smart_sdl_surface {
    SDL_Surface *handle;

    explicit smart_sdl_surface( char const *name )
        : handle( SDL_LoadBMP( name ) ) {}
    ~smart_sdl_surface()
        { SDL_FreeSurface( handle ); }
};

class ball
{
    private:
    static smart_sdl_surface ball_image_wrapper;
    static SDL_Surface *& ball_image; // reference to the ptr inside wrapper
};
smart_sdl_surface ball::ball_image_wrapper( "ball.bmp" );
SDL_Surface *&ball::ball_image = ball::ball_image_wrapper.handle;

When the program initializes, the constructor is called and the file is read. When the program exits, the destructor is called and the object is destroyed.