Traditionally, in C++, you would create any dependencies in the constructor and delete them in the destructor. class A { public: A() { m_b = new B(); } ~A() { delete m_b; } private: B* m_b; }...

I was making an RAII class that takes in a System.Windows.Form control, and sets its cursor. And in the destructor it sets the cursor back to what it was. But is this a bad idea? Can I safely rely...

I was just reading up on inversion of control (IOC) and it bothered me that it seems like it makes memory management a pain. Of course it seems ioc is mostly used in garbage collected environments ...

Can I trust that an object is destroyed and its destructor is called immediately when it goes out of scope in C#? I figure it should since many common coding practices (e.g. transaction objects) r...

Suppose I have an RAII-style C++ class: class StateSaver { public: StateSaver(int i) { saveState(); } ~StateSaver() { restoreState(); } }; ...to be used like so in my code: void Manipulate()...

Why is the following code prints "xxY"? Shouldn't local variables live in the scope of whole function? Can I use such behavior or this will be changed in future C++ standard? I thought that ...

I've been extensively using smart pointers (boost::shared_ptr to be exact) in my projects for the last two years. I understand and appreciate their benefits and I generally like them a lot. But the...

In C++ we have the Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) pattern, which greatly simplifies resource management. The idea is to provide some wrapping object for any kind of resources. ...

I've noticed RAII has been getting lots of attention on Stackoverflow, but in my circles (mostly C++) RAII is so obvious its like asking what's a class or a destructor. So I'm really curious if th...

I'm trying to design a class that needs to dynamically allocate some memory.. I had planned to allocate the memory it needs during construction, but how do I handle failed memory allocations? Shou...

It's been at least 5 years since I worked with Java, and back then, any time you wanted to allocate an object that needed cleaning up (e.g. sockets, DB handles), you had to remember to add a finall...

I've been evaluating various smart pointer implementations (wow, there are a LOT out there) and it seems to me that most of them can be categorized into two broad classifications: 1) This category...

I'm using C++ with the OpenCV library, which is a library image-processing although that's not relevant for this question. Currently I have a design decision to make. OpenCV, being a C library, h...

I have a few classes which do nothing except in their constructors/destructors. Here's an example class BusyCursor { private: Cursor oldCursor_; public: BusyCursor() { oldCursor_ = Curren...

In practice with C++, what is RAII, what are smart pointers, how are these implemented in a program and what are the benefits of using RAII with smart pointers?

The more we use RAII in C++, the more we find ourselves with destructors that do non-trivial deallocation. Now, deallocation (finalization, however you want to call it) can fail, in which case exce...

I just played with Java file system API, and came down with the following function, used to copy binary files. The original source came from the Web, but I added try/catch/finally clauses to be sur...

What are some general tips to make sure I don't leak memory in C++ programs? How do I figure out who should free memory that has been dynamically allocated?