Modern C++ for Absolute Beginners: A Friendly Introduction to C++ Programming Language and C++11 to C++20 Standards

© Slobodan Dmitrović 2020

S. DmitrovićModern C++ for Absolute Beginnershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6047-0_35

35. Smart Pointers

Slobodan Dmitrović¹ 

(1)

Belgrade, Serbia

 

Smart pointers are pointers that own the object they point to and automatically destroy the object they point to and deallocate the memory once the pointers go out of scope. This way, we do not have to manually delete the object like it was the case with the new and delete operators.

Smart pointers are declared in the <memory> header. We will cover the following smart pointers – unique and shared.

35.1 Unique Pointer

A unique pointer called std::unique_ptr is a pointer that owns an object it points to. The pointer can not be copied. Unique pointer deletes the object and deallocates ...