Re: Deriving from a STL container
bjeremy wrote:
On Oct 30, 12:50 pm, mosfet <john....@anonymous.org> wrote:
Could someone tell me why it's considered as bad practice to inherit
from STL container ?
And when you want to customize a STL container, do you mean I need to
write tons of code just to avoid to derive from it ?
STL Containers are not written with virtual destructors. You may open
yourself up to memory leaks.
Actually, undefined behaviour, if you mean trying to invoke the d-tor
polymorphically.
Also any extension to a std container may
not guarantee compatability with the std algorithms, you clients would
need to be aware of this.
I am not sure what you mean by this.
You shouldn't need to rewrite "tons of code", a standard practice is
to use composition and make an adapter class "have a" std container,
plus whatever extra functionality you need to extend the container for
in the first place.
.... which can also be achieved by private inheritance, last time I looked.
In any case, there are issues that need to be considered, but there is
no hard rule saying "do not inherit".
V
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