How do virtual destructors work?
- by Prabhu
Few hours back I was fiddling with a Memory Leak issue and it turned out that I really got some basic stuff about virtual destructors wrong! Let me put explain my class design.
class Base
{
virtual push_elements()
{}
};
class Derived:public Base
{
vector<int> x;
public:
void push_elements(){
for(int i=0;i <5;i++)
x.push_back(i);
}
};
void main()
{
Base* b = new Derived();
b->push_elements();
delete b;
}
The bounds checker tool reported a memory leak in the derived class vector. And I figured out that the destructor is not virtual and the derived class destructor is not called. And it surprisingly got fixed when I made the destructor virtual. Isn't the vector deallocated automatically even if the derived class destructor is not called? Is that a quirk in BoundsChecker tool or is my understanding of virtual destructor wrong?
