C++ Primer, Fifth Edition

13.5. Classes That Manage Dynamic Memory

Some classes need to allocate a varying amount of storage at run time. Such classes often can (and if they can, generally should) use a library container to hold their data. For example, our StrBlob class uses a vector to manage the underlying storage for its elements.

However, this strategy does not work for every class; some classes need to do their own allocation. Such classes generally must define their own copy-control members to manage the memory they allocate.

As an example, we’ll implement a simplification of the library vector class. Among the simplifications we’ll make is that our class will ...