Question

I’m utilizing a library written by a collegue and discovered that valgrind was spewing out errors related to the delete.

The problem was that there were allocations of char arrays like

char* s = new char[n];

followed up later with delete s

instead of delete[] s

He tells me that the difference is really that delete[] s will call a destructor for the object at each position in s (if it has one), in this case it doesn’t because it’s a primitive type. I believe that is true.

So delete s is not really a bug as such and valgrind is just being very thorough.

Will it still definitely free all the memory associated with s?

Answer 1

If you allocate an array using new[], you have to destroy it using delete[]. In general, the functions operator delete(void*) and operator delete[](void*) aren’t guaranteed to be the same.

Refer here