When a pointer goes out of scope, its memory is freed, so why are destructors created in c++?
When a pointer goes out of scope, its memory is freed, so why are
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When a pointer goes out of scope, its memory is freed, so why are destructors created in c++?
If you’re asking why C++ classes have destructors, some classes have requirements other than just freeing memory. You may have an object that’s allocated a socket connection that needs to be shut down cleanly, for example.
Also, ‘unscoping’ a pointer does not free the memory that it points to since other pointers may be referencing it.
If you have a pointer on the stack, exiting the function will free the memory used by the pointer but not that memory pointed to by the pointer. There’s a subtle but very important distinction.