Re: [Boost-users] serialization gives memory leaks due to throwing constructors

There are differing opinions on this. For example: http://www.arkestra.demon.co.uk/errors_cpp.html#acquire_resources_in_constru... and http://www.research.att.com/~bs/bs_faq2.html#ctor-exceptions Robert Ramey Andrew Mellinger wrote:

On 3/1/07 2:18 PM, "gast128" wrote:

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Dear all,

I ran into an exception thrown by the constructor. But there is no way to call 'delete_created_pointers' on the object since the object is never fully created (see below)

Is there something to do about?

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This throwing c++ constructor stuff is btw the way to transport errors according to a lot of c++ gurus. But my persnonal opinion is that it sucks. Every created object must be guarded with exception safety. For large applications, this exception mecahnism is very tricky and sources for a lot unwanted application terminations or memory leaks.

I agree. At my workplace we have a convention. For heavyweight objects that would do interesting things in their constructors we instead use the alloc-init paradigm of Objective-C. In this model, the constructor does simply non-error things, then a corresponding init (or even suite of init methods) does the interesting things. This has the added benefit that the init method can be overridden in subclasses, and you don't need to re-implement all the behaviors.

-Andrew