c++ pointer scope

Question

What happens when you have the following code:

void makeItHappen()
{
    char* text = \"Hello, world\";
}

Does text go out of

Answer 1

The variable text does go out of scope (however the string literal is not deleted).

For objects that you allocate with new (like your SomeClass), you need to explicitly delete them. If you want objects allocated like this to be automatically deleted, take a look at boost smart pointers (std::unique_ptr if your compiler is c++0x aware).

This will automatically delete the allocated object when the shared pointer goes out of scope.

Your code would then look like this:

int main(int argv, char **argv)
{
  boost::scoped_ptr ptr(new SomeClass);
  // the object is automatically deleted
  return 0;
}

Note: In this particular example, you could also use std::auto_ptr (but this will be deprecated in c++0x).

Note 2: As was pointed out in the comments by Kos, it is in this case more appropriate to use boost::scoped_ptr or std::unique_ptr (c++0x). My answer first used boost::shared_ptr, which is more appropriate if you need to share ownership of a pointer between several classes for instance.