One of the most common idioms I see in a delphi program looks like the following:
foo := TObject.Create;
try
// Do something with foo
finally
FreeAndNil(foo);
end;
It’s primarily because you always create objects on the heap, and everything involving an object, essentially, is a pointer. This makes for a little bit of a memory management issue. You have to remember to destroy objects after you’ve created them, and because if something goes wrong, that destruction needs to take place in a finally block. Having it take place in a finally block keeps you safe from exceptions. If an exception is triggered it always passes through the finally block on it’s way back up the stack. This gives you the ability to cleanup temporary objects as needed
C++ uses the RAII idiom, which means that objects that are defined at a certain scope are always going to be destroyed once that scope is exited. What this means is that if you define an object X in a function Y, once Y is returned from then X will be destructed/destroyed. As an example:
std::stringstream streamer; // do something with streamer
There’s no awkward streamer.create call, and once you return from the function streamer is appropriately tidied up
But wait, you say, they are not the same, what you are doing in Delphi is creating an object on the heap, while in C++ you are creating it on the stack, so of course during the process of unwinding said stack, you will destroy the object. The more equivalent code in C++ would have been:
std::stringstream *streamer = new std::stringstream(); // Do something with streamer delete streamer;
Hah you say, no try finally means that if an exception is triggered in the ‘do something’ piece of code, you leak a streamer object on the heap.
To which I respond, silly rabbit, that’s why you didn’t create a pointer in the first place with the first piece of code. If you want to perform something like this, then you should use a smart pointer, which takes care of the destruction of the object once the smart pointer exits scope, like so:
std::unique_ptr<std::stringstream> streamer(new std::stringstream); // Do something with streamer
But really, if you were just going to create an entity for the duration of a function, it’s far easier to just create it in-place without such complications
This leads to a little gotcha that regulary catches non C++ programmers when they are creating methods. As they typically come from a pointer-based economy (e.g. Delphi, Java), when they create a method:
function doSomething(object : TObject) : integer
What they’re doing is actually passing in a reference to TObject (as it’s just a pointer), and because it’s pass-by-value in this case, what they’re really just passing in is the value of the pointer. In C++ it’s a little bit different. When you pass in an object using the form:
int do_something(std::stringstream streamer)
What actually happens is a copy is made of the item being passed, and it’s that which ends up in the function; not the actual object that you’re passing in. If you want to pass in a reference to the object, then you need to use the reference passing semantic:
int do_something(std::stringstream &streamer)
You can use the const modifier if the method you’re invoking is not going to modify the passed in reference, which allows you to restrict the things you can do with the reference. In this form you don’t need to perform any indirection on the object (e.g. getting a pointer to it) in order to pass it in. This makes for slightly tidier code, which isn’t strewn with &’s on the way in, and var->’s in the method itself.
And for those Delphi haters out there; the reason I picked Delphi rather than Java is because Delphi is, unless you’re using the .NET variant, a non garbage collected language, and as such requires the free, otherwise you get memory leaks.
Objective C is another kettle of fish. Between the original model of retain/release, the GC model that was available on OS X from 10.5, and now the totally shiny ARC mechanism, it makes some people cry.