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Asked: 2026-05-16T17:57:12+00:00

Why is there a delete[] ? From my understanding its to behave differently for

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Why is there a delete[]? From my understanding its to behave differently for arrays. However, why does it really exist? There’s only free in C and no free_array. Also in syntax the only difference between delete var and delete []var is the [] which has no params (I’m not telling the length of the array).

So why does delete[] really exist? I know someone will say you can overload delete and delete[] (at least i think that is possible) but lets say we are not overloading it. Why does it exist?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Typically, for non-POD classes, a delete[] expression must call destructors on a variable number of class instances that cannot be determined at compile time. The compiler typically has to implement some run time “magic” that can be used to determine the correct number of objects to destroy.

    A delete expression doesn’t have to worry about this, it simply has to destroy the one object that the supplied pointer is pointing to. Because of this, it can have a more efficient implementation.

    By splitting up delete and delete[], delete can be implemented without the overhead needed to correctly implement delete[] as well.

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