Question

Consider the following piece of Java code.

int N = 10; Object obj[] = new Object[N]; for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) {     int capacity = 1000 * i;     obj[i] = new ArrayList(capacity); } 

Because in Java, all objects live on the Heap, the array does not contain the objects themselves, but references to the objects. Also, the array itself is also an object, thus it lives on the heap.

What is the equivalent in C++, but keeping the array and objects on the stack, to avoid as much as possible needing new and delete ?

Edit: changed the code to use a custom constructor.

Answer 1

For an array of ArrayList objects:

ArrayList obj[10]; 

The objects will be default initialised, which is fine for user-defined types, but may not be what you want for builtin-types.

Consider also:

std::vector<ArrayList> obj(10, ArrayList()); 

This initialises the objects by copying whatever you pass as the second parameter. So they’re all the same, but not necessarily default. And as litb points out, the ’10’ in the vector can be replaced by a non-constant expression, whereas the ’10’ in the array declaration can’t.

This doesn’t actually put the ArrayList objects on the stack, it puts all 10 in a single allocation from the heap. So there may very rarely be performance concerns, if you really can’t afford a single allocation. However, the std::vector is on the stack and it deletes any heap objects it uses when it is destroyed. So for the purposes of making sure your resources are freed, the vector behaves ‘as though’ it were all on the stack.

Note that mixing a container of Object, with ArrayList values, as you do in your example Java code, is fraught with peril in C++. Basically you can’t do it, even if ArrayList extends Object, because the array would only contain the storage for 10 Objects, and ArrayList likely requires more bytes to store than Object. The result is that any ArrayList you try to copy into the array would get ‘sliced’: only the initial part of its representation is put in the array.

If you want a container of a type saying that it contains Objects, but which actually contains ArrayLists, then you need a container of pointers. To get good resource-handling, this probably means you need a container of smart pointers.