Question

I have started out to write a simple console Yahtzee game for practice. I just have a question regarding whether or not this function will leak memory. The roll function is called every time the dices need to be re-rolled.

What it does is to create a dynamic array. First time it is used it will store 5 random values. For the next run it will only re-roll all except for the dice you want to keep. I have another function for that, but since it isn’t relevant for this question I left it out

Main function

int *kast = NULL;           //rolled dice
int *keep_dice = NULL;    //which dice to re-roll or keep

kast = roll(kast, keep_dice);
delete[] kast;

and here’s the function

int *roll(int *dice, int *keep) {

    srand((unsigned)time(0));
    int *arr = new int[DICE];
    if(!dice)
    {
        for(int i=0;i<DICE;i++)
        {

            arr[i] = (rand()%6)+1;
            cout << arr[i] << " ";
        }
    }
    else
    {
        for(int i=0;i<DICE;i++)
        {
            if(!keep[i])
            {
                dice[i] = (rand()%6)+1;
                cout << "Change ";
            }
            else
            {
                keep[i] = 0;
                cout << "Keep ";
            }
        }
        cout << endl;
        delete[] arr;
        arr = NULL;
        arr = dice;

    }
    return arr;
}

Answer 1

Yes, it can leak. Just for example, using cout can throw an exception, and if it does, your delete will never be called.

Instead of allocating a dynamic array yourself, you might want to consider returning an std::vector. Better still, turn your function into a proper algorithm, that takes an iterator (in this case, a back_insert_iterator) and writes its output there.

Edit: Looking at it more carefully, I feel obliged to point out that I really dislike the basic structure of this code completely. You have one function that’s really doing two different kinds of things. You also have a pair of arrays that you’re depending on addressing in parallel. I’d restructure it into two separate functions, a roll and a re_roll. I’d restructure the data as an array of structs:

struct die_roll { 
    int value;
    bool keep;

    die_roll() : value(0), keep(true) {}
};

To do an initial roll, you pass a vector (or array, if you truly insist) of these to the roll function, which fills in initial values. To do a re-roll, you pass the vector to re-roll which re-rolls to get a new value for any die_roll whose keep member has been set to false.