Re: Returning reference to pointer

Hello. I have a question that is simultaneously simple and
complicated.
I have a custom class I wrote, and I want to return new instances of
it by reference (for odd reasons). I have the deconstructor of this
class outputting to stdout when it is called.

In MSVC++, returning a reference to a new instance of this object
seems to be legitimate - if I assign it to a local reference,

it gets
deconstructed when it goes out of scope - but does it get deleted?

Here's an example of what I've been testing against:

Object& someFunction()
{
   Object *newObject = new Object();
   return *(newObject);
}

int main()
{
   Object outer = someFunction();
   cout << "Before" << endl;
   {
      Object inner = someFunction();
   }
   cout << "After" << endl;
   return 0;
}

The result of this appears to be as such (pretending the deconstructor
outputs the object name):

Before
inner deconstructed.
After
outer deconstructed.

If I do not assign someFunction() to a value, a deconstructor is never
apparently called. Is this a memory leak?
The deconstructor is being called for inner, but is the memory getting
cleaned up?