Beautiful C++: 30 Core Guidelines for Writing Clean, Safe, and Fast Code

Chapter 3.1

I.11: Never transfer ownership by a raw pointer (T*) or reference (T&)

Using the free store

Ownership is important. It implies responsibility which, in C++, means cleaning up after yourself. If you create something, you clean it up. While this is a completely trivial matter for objects of static and automatic storage duration, it is a minefield for objects of dynamic duration which are allocated from the free store.

Once memory is allocated from the free store it can be very easily lost. It can only be returned to the free store using the pointer to which it was assigned. This pointer is the only available handle to the memory. If that pointer falls out of scope without being copied, then the memory can never be recovered. This ...