What is the use of “delete this”?

Question

Today, I have seen some legacy code. In the destructor there is a statement like \"delete this\". I think, this call will be recursive. Why it is working?

Answer 1

"delete this" is commonly used for ref counted objects. For a ref counted object the decision of when to delete is usually placed on the object itself. Here is an example of what a Release method would look like [1].

int MyRefCountedObject::Release() {
  _refCount--;
  if ( 0 == _refCount ) {
    delete this;
    return 0;
  }
  return _refCount;
}

ATL COM objects are a prime example of this pattern.

[1] Yes I realize this is not thread safe.