Question

We have some issue with my friend. Assume, we have a class which implements database connection, like this:

class DB
{
void Connect();
void Disconnect();
// ...
~DB();
};

In my opinion, destructor should be minimalistic, which means destructor should not call Disconnect method when connection was established. I think, that this should be done by separate method (disconnect() in this example). Am I correct, or my friend is?

PS. Community Wiki?

Answer 1

The RAII idioms says: acquire in the constructor and release in the deconstructor. You must guarantee that your deconstructor will NOT throw anything. Otherwise you will have core dump (or undefined behaviour) if your object deconstructor will throw an exception during the stack-unwind.

Also in your specific case I will probably implement a reference counting mechanism, and call the disconnect just when you haven’t any more object using the connection.