Managing Containers of Pointers

[Aaron Vienneau]

Hey all,

Would you recommend managing containers of pointers through unique_ptr<T> interfaces? In an effort to keep memory management errors to a minimum, I want to create a container of pointers that will automatically clean themselves up after the container's destructor is called. Is that what this code is doing?

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <memory>

struct myStruct
{
	myStruct(int i) { myData = i;}
	int myData;
};

int main()
{
	{ // Block Scope
		std::vector<std::unique_ptr<myStruct>> myContainer; //container created

		for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
		{
			myContainer.push_back(std::unique_ptr<myStruct>(new myStruct(i))); // This allocates a new struct on freestore and passes ownership to a unique_ptr?
		}
	} // container destroyed

	// all of myStructs released?
   return 0;
}

[helios]

Yes, the pointers will be freed when myContainer goes of out scope.

Note that you also have std::make_unique_ptr().

[Aaron Vienneau]

Thank you! This is helpful. I didn't know about std::make_unique_ptr().