Re: static variables and memory cleanup

From:

"Chris ( Val )" <chrisval@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:34:43 -0700

Message-ID:

<1190979283.189580.187120@50g2000hsm.googlegroups.com>

On Sep 28, 8:46 pm, Anonymous <no.re...@here.com> wrote:

I want to carry out initialisation ONCE for use by a class.

I am using a dummy static variable dummy to do this. However, during my
initialisation code, I am allocating memory etc for various variables
used by the class.

Although I am not explicitly deallocating memory, alloc'd memory will be
returned to the heap when the app terminates - but I am not happy with
this. I am looking for a way to explicitly deallocate memory when there
are no more instances of the class that requires the new'd variables.

I can think of several ways of doing this - all of which seem a bit of a
hack (or maybe even wrong?). i'd like some comments on my ideas, and
pointers if any of my proposed solns are wrong or have side effects - or
preferably, a better way of solving this problem.

1). Use a class variable for reference counting and explicitly
"uninitialize" when last instance is dying

2). Wrap up all of the variables to be new'd during the initialisation
process, into a data type (struct or class), make a class variable of
that type, initialize it once, and deallocate in the new data types
destructor

Any more ideas ?

struct foo {
  ~foo() { std::cout << "Destructed\n"; }
};

int main()
{
  foo* f = new foo();
  f->~foo();

  std::cin.get();
  return 0;
}

Cheers,
Chris Val