On 10/30/2017 03:32 AM, Pedro Alves wrote: > On 10/25/2017 06:20 PM, Jeff Law wrote: > >> My conclusion on the virtual dtor issue is that it's not strictly needed >> right now. >> >> IIUC the issue is you could do something like >> >> base *foo = new derived (); >> [ ... ] >> delete foo; >> >> If the base's destructor is not virtual and foo is a base * pointing to >> a derived object then the deletion invokes undefined behavior. >> >> In theory we shouldn't be doing such things :-) In fact, if there's a >> way to prevent this with some magic on the base class I'd love to know >> about it. > > There is: make the base class destructor protected. I was just reviewing our coding conventions, mostly because I thought we had something about using protected. While doing so I see that our conventions explicitly indicate that a polymorphic class should have a virtual destructor.
So even though there's another solution and I don't think these objects are likely to suffer from the problems noted above, I'm just going to change things to follow our existing conventions -- just because I'm not dynamically allocating these objects doesn't mean someone else won't later.. Jeff
