Question

Say I have two classes created work and workItem.

        CWorker *work = new CWorker();
        CWorkItem *workItem = new CWorkItem();

The work class has a public list m_WorkList and I add the work item to it.

work->m_WorkList.push_back(workItem);

If I just delete work

if(work != NULL)
delete work;

Do I need to loop through the list in the destructor like the following? Any better way to do this? Could I use clear instead?

while(m_WorkList.size())
{
    CWorkItem *workItem = m_WorkList.front();
    m_WorkList.pop_front();
    if(workItem)
        delete workItem;
}

Answer 1

Yes you need to delete each item. If you call new N times, then you need to call delete exactly N times as well. There is no shortcut for bulk deleting items.

Also when you’re done with it you need to call delete on work.

You can use new[] and delete[] if you want to create an array of items on the heap and release the items on the heap respectively at once. But in your case this isn’t what you’re looking for.

You can look to boost::shared_ptr if you don’t want to manually do these delete calls.