Question

I’m a bit confused about handling an array of objects in C++, as I can’t seem to find information about how they are passed around (reference or value) and how they are stored in an array.

I would expect an array of objects to be an array of pointers to that object type, but I haven’t found this written anywhere. Would they be pointers, or would the objects themselves be laid out in memory in an array?

In the example below, a custom class myClass holds a string (would this make it of variable size, or does the string object hold a pointer to a string and therefore take up a consistent amount of space. I try to create a dynamic array of myClass objects within a myContainer. In the myContainer.addObject() method I attempt to make a bigger array, copy all the objects into it along with a new object, then delete the old one. I’m not at all confident that I’m cleaning up my memory properly with my destructors – what improvements could I make in this area?

class myClass
{
    private:
          string myName;
          unsigned short myAmount;

    public:
        myClass(string name, unsigned short amount)
        {
            myName = name;
        myAmount = amount;
        }

    //Do I need a destructor here? I don't think so because I don't do any
    // dynamic memory allocation within this class
};



class myContainer
{
    int numObjects;
    myClass * myObjects;

   public:
    myContainer()
    {
        numObjects = 0;
    }   

    ~myContainer()
    {
        //Is this sufficient?
        //Or do I need to iterate through myObjects and delete each
        // individually?
        delete [] myObjects;
    }


    void addObject(string name, unsigned short amount)
    {
        myClass newObject = new myClass(name, amount);

        myClass * tempObjects;
        tempObjects = new myClass[numObjects+1];
        for (int i=0; i<numObjects; i++)
            tempObjects[i] = myObjects[i]);
        tempObjects[numObjects] = newObject;
        numObjects++;
        delete newObject;

        //Will this delete all my objects? I think it won't.
        //I'm just trying to delete the old array, and have the new array hold
        // all the objects plus the new object.
        delete [] myObjects;
        myObjects = tempObjects;
    }
};

Answer 1

An array in C++ is an array of objects laid out in memory.
So for example in:

struct pair {
   int x; int y;
};
...
pair array[10];

Each item in the array is going to be with a size of two ints.
If you want an array of pointers you can simply declare one:

pair* array_of_pointers[10];

The string objects have pointers to the variable size part of the string. So they’re safe.
In fact they’re the important lesson here. Same way you use the string class to avoid excessive memory handling you can use the vector class to avoid all the troubles of handling a dynamic array.

For the case you’re doing this as an exercise. Here are a few problems:
newObject needs to be allocated locally, without new. This will make the code correct (as newObject is not a pointer and new returns a pointer) and will also save you the trouble of explicitly handling memory. (On a more advanced note, this makes the code exception safe in one more location)
myObject is never initialized. And you don’t use initialization lists in the constructor. The constructor should look like this:

myContainer() : numObjects(0), myObjects(NULL)
{

}  

The destructors in the code are exactly as they should be.