On 05/04/2011 04:27 PM, Nevin Liber wrote:
I have a hard time imaging a useable code base which has a convention that any time a pointer is returned one should assume that the memory must be deleted by the caller.
I remember reading an article in Dr. Dobbs years ago where one of the regular writers was reviewing some framework library. His opinion was the opposite of yours I think. He didn't like that the framework was handling the lifetime for him, even of its own objects. He really wanted to see a 'delete' in his own code matching every place an object was created dynamically. This was before smart pointers caught on.
You couldn't even call something as simple as strncat in such an environment, let alone most libraries with a C API.
Haha, most of the time programmers can't call strncat without writing a nul-termination bug anyway. I don't think I've called strncat in my last few hundred thousand lines of code. I do have to work with C APIs all the time though and, you're right, it takes *a lot* of extra care to do it correctly. - Marsh