Question

I am creating a custom object and overriding the + operator. I am return a new object of the same type. Is it bad practise to allocate memory inside this method? because I then I will need to delete the memory out of scope.

Answer 1

Yes, without further information, it is bad.

Usually you do:

struct X
{
     int m_i;
     X(int i) : m_i(i) {  }

     X operator+(const X& another) const
     {
         return X(m_i + another.m_i); // note, not new X(...)
     }
}

That said, you could return a unique_ptr if you really had to allocate dynamically.