C++17 STL Cookbook

How it works...

Handling heap objects with std::unique_ptr is really simple. After we initialized a unique pointer to hold a pointer to some object, there is no way we can accidentally forget about deleting it on some code path.

If we assign some new pointer to a unique pointer, then it will always first delete the old object it pointed to and then store the new pointer. On a unique pointer variable, x, we can also call x.reset() to just delete the object it points to immediately without assigning a new pointer. Another equivalent alternative to reassigning via x = new_pointer is x.reset(new_pointer).

There is indeed one single way to release an object from the management of unique_ptr without deleting it. The release function does that, ...