Home/ Questions/Q 8462149
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-10T14:05:16+00:00

I am talking about general application’s, not low-level such that they are interfacing with

  • 0

I am talking about general application’s, not low-level such that they are interfacing with hardware.

Looking at legacy code there is lots of:

delete myObject;

Why was the concept of Smart Pointer’s not introduced much earlier, it just makes use of RAII, a concept where stack based object’s destruct on leaving scope. This has been there since day one.

Could it be performance, one extra level of direction (but this is small price/overhead to pay).

A developer can create a basic but functional custom Smart Pointer in less than 30 minutes. So why so long?

Or was it there, but people chose not to make use of it…

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t know the answer, but as C++ evolved from C, a lot of code in C used malloc/free as there was no other way to do it and so it carried over to C++ as new/delete. I’m sure the smart pointer implementation in C++ occurred after the language was created, after all, it needs templates which didn’t exist in early versions of C++.

    • 0