In the recent overload journal under the topic Enforcing the rule of zero, the authors describe how we can avoid writing the Rule of five operators as the reasons for writing them are:
And both these can be taken care of by using smart pointers.
Here I am specifically interested in the second part.
Consider the following code snippet:
class Base
{
public:
virtual void Fun() = 0;
};
class Derived : public Base
{
public:
~Derived()
{
cout << "Derived::~Derived\n";
}
void Fun()
{
cout << "Derived::Fun\n";
}
};
int main()
{
shared_ptr<Base> pB = make_shared<Derived>();
pB->Fun();
}
In this case, as the authors of the article explain, we get polymorphic deletion by using a shared pointer, and this does work.
But if I replace the shared_ptr
with a unique_ptr
, I am no longer able to observe the polymorphic deletion.
Now my question is, why are these two behaviors different? Why does shared_ptr
take care of polymorphic deletion while unique_ptr
doesn't?
You have your answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22861890/2007142
Quote:
Once the last referring
shared_ptr
goes out of scope or is reset,~Derived()
will be called and the memory released. Therefore, you don't need to make~Base()
virtual.unique_ptr<Base>
andmake_unique<Derived>
do not provide this feature, because they don't provide the mechanics ofshared_ptr
with respect to the deleter, because unique pointer is much simpler and aims for the lowest overhead and thus is not storing the extra function pointer needed for the deleter.