Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

Managing resources

We have already seen one sort of resource that requires careful management: memory. You allocate memory with new, and when you have finished with the memory you must deallocate the memory with delete. A failure to deallocate the memory will cause a memory leak. Memory is, perhaps, the most fundamental of system resources, but most operating systems have many others: file handles, handles to graphic objects, synchronization objects, threads, and processes. Sometimes possession of such a resource is exclusive and will prevent other code from accessing the resource accessed through the resource. Thus, it is important that such resources are freed at some point, and, usually, that they are freed in a timely manner.

Classes ...